My published articles and papers on software development, agile practices, and AI in software engineering.
A practical PDCA framework for accountable AI code generation. Structure sessions in phases: agent-led analysis and planning (compatible with plan mode), test-first code changes, validation against goals, and targeted retrospectives to refine prompts. Apply these agile disciplines to maintain quality and control over the code you ship.
The race to adopt AI code generation is a sustainability crisis that Agile practitioners are uniquely positioned to solve. Here is a disciplined Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle. Each step has a distinct purpose and builds upon the prior ones.
Use AI tools to retrieve the conceptual design of legacy software and reduce the toil of lengthy up-front design.
Using large language models to analyze requirements while maintaining human accountability for the veracity of the results.
The percentage of women software developers in the U.S. has declined from 42% in 1987 to less than 25% today. This is in a software/internet marketplace where women are online in equal numbers to men, directly or indirectly influence 61% of consumer electronics purchases, generate 58% of online dollars, and represent 42% of active gamers. Women avoid careers in software due to hostile environments, unsustainable pace, diminished sense of purpose, disadvantages in pay, and lack of advancement, peers or mentors. Agile Software Development is founded upon values that challenge such dysfunction in order to build self-organizing, collaborative and highly productive teams. In a high functioning Agile practice, developers engage each other, product owners and sponsors in a shared concern for quality, predictability and meeting the needs of end users. Can Agile values and practice drive changes in the workplace to better attract and retain women software developers?
Software practitioners experience pressure to compromise their work and their reasonable care for others. Even as software becomes more beneficial, pervasive, and interconnected, the potential for unintended harm grows. Agile software development is an approach to building software systems that embodies a set of declared core principles. How do these principles align to an ethical standard of conduct? This paper attempts from an agile practitioner's perspective to compare and contrast agile principles with other approaches to software ethics. It identifies areas of strong resonance and gaps that exist between the stated agile principles and an explicit software code of ethical conduct.
Scrum describes a separation of roles; the product owner is accountable for achieving business objectives and the team for technical execution. A pragmatic and collegial relationship between a product owner and team can satisfy the definition of collaboration and honor roles while barely tapping or actually working against the potential of a project and its participants. This paper surveys literature to describe different forms of collaboration, to establish that deep, unbounded collaboration is at the heart of agile values, and that partnerships of high trust and shared risk lead to value and innovation. Finally, this paper incorporates a real- world example of a product owner who, while remaining accountable to the outcome, shared ownership over vision, priorities and execution with her scrum/XP development team.
In 2006, Oxygen Media CEO Geraldine (Gerry) Laybourne, the woman largely responsible for Nickelodeon's early success, partnered with her XP/Scrum development team to create a new mission and new revenue stream for her company. This experience report covers product conception through initial release of a single product. It describes how Gerry's leadership qualities paired with agile practices to engender deep mutual trust and collective ownership over technical execution and business outcome. This unbounded collaboration provides a template for future projects at Oxygen and other organizations with innovation as part of their agile product development strategy.
The media industry is challenged to find new lines of business as technology redefines content, distribution and customer expectations. This is a case study of Oxygen Media where a CEO leading an innovation program partnered with her agile software development team. It spans nine months and details how top-down, bottom-up interaction lead to a new consumer software initiative. The strategy described evolved as the sum of small decisions taken over time driven by vision and filtered through Oxygen's corporate culture. At each step, the company's actions were informed by Scrum/XP practices and values. This paper draws support for Oxygen Media's emergent strategy in Nonaka and Takeuchi's five phase model for organizational knowledge creation. This model explains why Oxygen Media has had initial success in its innovation effort. It is also instructive where the model departs from Oxygen Media's strategy and points to challenges yet to be addressed by the company...