David Sabine

@davidsabine
37 Followers
29 Following
1,013 Posts
Founder Betterteams.Academy
Professional Scrum Trainer @Scrumdotorg
Professional Kanban Trainer @prokanban
Formerly @Metrist_io, @CodingDojoDotCo, @digitalocean, @OriumInc
wwwhttps://betterteams.academy
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linkedinhttps://ca.linkedin.com/in/davidsabine
Given the current trends with AI tools, it appears likely executives may finally understand my advice to keep teams small.

If my clients would listen to just one piece of advice:

* teams are the most valuable performance unit.
* small teams adapt faster than large teams.

(that's 2 pieces of advice)

AI trends indicate that, as cognitive grunt work vanishes, small teams are able to make rapid decisions and keep bureaucracy to a minimum.

Small teams (3 to 5 max) are more nimble and learn (together) faster.

Executives tend to think “more people = more productivity”.

But the bottleneck in knowledge work is always the pace of decision-making (i.e., bureaucracy).

More people equals more bureaucracy equals slower teams.

Employ developers capable of owning architecture, design, code, and test, who are willing to work in close proximity with end users and key stakeholders. People with this broad skillset work in ways that shorten the feedback loop and accelerate decision-making.

This article illustrates a classic problem with the common use of #velocity as a metric.

https://betterteams.fm/articles/2019/06/Velocity-Escape-this-Pitfall/

#noestimates #escapevelocity

Great developers take ownership of quality and delivery.

TDD + AI

Without great automated acceptance tests, AI-generated code could too easily be black-box hallucinations.

Automated tests are an art. Tests are now the most valuable code in the repo.

TDD + AI

There is debate, and time will tell as techniques evolve, about the optimal size of the behaviour/unit described in tests; evidence is mounting that coding agents excel at writing and managing unit-level tests, while humans focus on describing acceptance-level tests.

Hey, fyi,

I teach TDD.

https://davidsabine.ca/tdd/

Test Driven Development (TDD) — David Sabine | Agile Practices Coach | AI Whisperer | Scrum Trainer | Kanban Guide

Professional Scrum, AI, and Kanban Training with David Sabine

Test Driven Development (TDD) — David Sabine | Agile Practices Coach | AI Whisperer | Scrum Trainer | Kanban Guide