When I’m teaching agile classes, one of the first things I talk about are what I think of as the three legs of the table we’re working from.
⮕ Building it right: Do we have strong technical practices? Are we able to quickly and reliably get features built that will then run with high quality in production? If we can’t make a change without breaking something else we’re not winning.
⮕ Building the right thing: Building the wrong thing fast, helps nobody. Are we actually building the right thing at the right time? Are we validating that what we built did meet the clients needs?
⮕ Building it sustainably: Are we able to maintain the current pace indefinitely or are we burning our people out? Are we balancing out long term need against short term need to avoid taking too many shortcuts?
All too often we focus on just one or two of these. The hype around AI is a perfect example. Yes, it makes us able to write code significantly faster, but are we building the right things and doing it in a way that we can sustain? Are we building a foundation that we can keep working with, or are we making a lot of short term decisions that are going to come back and make our lives miserable later?
In some cases, I see teams that are successfully achieving all three with the use of AI and getting amazing results. In others, I see them deliver the wrong things faster than ever before, and in ways that will come back to haunt them.
It’s worth asking: are we keeping an eye on the bigger picture or are we hyper-focused on the shiny new toy?