Tag Archives: risk management

Risk management

AI development — Same problems but faster

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Twelve months ago I looked at the bold predictions of tech-CEOs. The most vocal predicted big changes in software development and the wholesale replacement of software engineers with AI. A revolution.

“In three to six months, AI is writing 90 percent of the code.” “Probably in 2025, we … are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of midlevel engineer that you have at your company that can write code.”

It didn’t happen. It looked like hype then and a year later it is confirmed as pure hype — from CEOs who needed a better Q2 forecast.

AI writes a great deal of code, quickly, but we haven’t seen the promised revolution. Organisations are not seeing the productivity increases the hype forecast. As I said at the time, “these tools aren’t (yet) replacing engineers, but they are redefining what engineers do”.

For myself, looking back over the last year, I don’t think AI has revolutionised anything in software development. Nothing. I think we’re seeing the same problems, just faster.
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Bold Predictions or Hype? Tech CEOs on AI’s Impact on Software Development

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I’ve never seen a hype cycle like this one. Huge sound bites about AI — specifically, generative AI. Depending on who you ask, AI is either a helpful copilot or it’s gunning for your entire dev team’s jobs. As usual the truth is probably somewhere in between. But with so many CEOs talking up how much code AI is generating, it’s worth stepping back to ask: are they predicting the future, or selling it?
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Disaster, rescue and recovery: Kickstarting delivery

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70% of projects fail to deliver — and the cost is more than financial. Few broken programmes crash in a spectacular fashion. Most just quietly stall. You’ve got a roadmap. You’ve got people. You’ve got the rituals. But… nothing’s really moving. Instead you have sceptical stakeholders, wincing delivery teams, endless meetings and no actual decisions. Everyone is busy, but no one is sure what they’re delivering or why. Sound familiar? You’ve stalled.
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Another kicking from stakeholders? Not when dispassionate and positive

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“Well, we just got another kicking”. A group of us, representing technology, had just attended the regular programme board meeting with the business types. In the debrief afterwards the technology folk around me were despondent. In fact they were despondent every month after this meeting. They genuinely felt kicked. But I didn’t. I never did. It was almost like I experienced a completely different meeting to that experienced by my colleagues.
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You can go a long way with a Shonky User Interface

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“Shonky” means poor or low quality where I come from. I realised it was a Kiwi phrase, or at least Antipodean, when I told my current UK based team to “give me a shonky user interface (UI)”. They looked puzzled, then laughed, then asked me what I meant, then laughed again, then adopted the phrase into the team vocabulary.

Aside from the entertaining aspect of my request, it does raise two questions:

  • What is a Shonky UI?
  • Why on earth would anybody ask for a Shonky UI?

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