Tag Archives: innovation

AI Isn’t Magic — It’s a Stack

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Artificial Intelligence. Two words that trigger everything from excited coffee chats with my mates to boardroom FOMO to outright apocalyptic fear. AI has dominated every conversation I’ve had for the last six months. Everyone wants a slice of it. It shows up in product roadmaps, vendor decks, job specs, and shareholder updates. But when I scratched beneath the surface, I found a messy pile of buzzwords and vague ambition.

I don’t know about you, but I like simple. So here is my attempt to make AI simple.

If you’re leading digital delivery, managing platforms, or just trying to figure out what AI means for your portfolio, this is your practical intro. There are buzzwords, but I explain them. There is no hype because I don’t have to impress anybody. It is just a clear look at how AI is structured, what matters now, and what’s coming.

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Another Silver Bullet? What AI Tools Can Learn from the Last 50 Years of Developer Hype

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The emergence of AI coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot, Amazon CodeWhisperer, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet has stirred debate about their long-term impact on software development. I’ve been in this game a while, which means I approach software innovation with a healthy dose of scepticism. I have seen lots of fashion trends — waves of developer productivity tools — some impactful, most not. From 4GLs to IDEs to low-code — each one promising to change the game, then fading into the background. Sound familiar? Every year there is somebody claiming they have a tool that can write your code for you. Is AI just the latest wave? I wondered if looking back at those old patterns — the hype, the crashes, the survivors — might tell us where this one’s going. Do those patterns from history tell me anything about the current trajectory of AI coding tools? The answer? Yes and no. Which, if you’ve ever worked in software, is probably the only honest answer you’ll get.
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Make BlackOps development the Corporate Standard – Embrace Microservices

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Contrary to how they are perceived in the media as lumbering dinosaurs, most large organisations have loads of clever people and good ideas.The trouble is these organisations can’t deliver against the ideas. The answer is not “Blue Sky” R&D departments or “BlackOps” teams. The answer is to make the BlackOps approach standard; create an innovation platform built from microservices with new services deployed swiftly into production.
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Disruptive Innovation is an Illusion Hiding Efficiency

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The way I see it disruptive innovation is an illusion to observers who have not had the same focus. From my experience that apparent disruptive innovation actually comes from companies who have invested and honed very tight, very frugal or cost effective product iterations on what is ultimately a predictable destination. In other words, to be truly innovative in a digital landscape you just need to be very efficient.
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Test driven architecture – use your tests to inform architecture

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As test-loving development teams, we are all painfully aware of the complexity of getting an application into the zen state of development – quick, test-driven red/green feedback for developers, software designs that are functionally on-the-money from a test-led, “outside-in” approach (from BDD), and a nigh on seamless continuous delivery process as a result. Very few teams achieve this, and those that do are frequently gifted a green-field project in which to engender them.

As test-savvy teams, when tests start to hamper the release process, we often assume our approach to testing needs an overhaul, but that might not be the case. Here we look at the role of architecture in test-driven applications, and examine whether we should listen to our tests to examine our macro design.
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Fluid Planning and Execution Creates Agility

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Thought leaders in the US military are challenging traditional approaches to command and control. These military innovators are proposing a more fluid approach that allows simultaneous planning and execution. It is good to see they are catching up but as an Agile practitioner I already do fluid planning and execution.
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