Lean Coffee Morning 13th March 2025 Summary

[Leon Hewitt]

Morning all.

Thank you to everyone who attended this morning: Dimitry, Charles, Jim, Ian, Anthony Green, Chris.

Jim suggested it would be good for all of us to share notes from the session and keep the conversation going between lean coffee mornings. So please share and discuss things in this thread.

A request from Chris for next time: think about AI success stories and bring them along. They don't have to be software engineering focused, they could be about anything.

Here are the notes I jotted down during the conversation. 

Using AI to create code

Do we still need skilled programmers?

• There is a need to understand the language generated by the AI
• How do you judge the quality of the code generated?
• Maintenance of software - we don’t just write it once and never look at it again
• Article: https://www.chrismdp.com/coding-with-ai/
• Talk: The Convergence - how AI is changing Agile Roles and Practices. - Stuart Munton
• Article: https://blog.robbowley.net/2025/03/06/good-engineering-practices-have-become-essential-in-the-age-of-genai-assisted-development
• AI is a tool. Software engineers are like carpenters, AI is a saw, screwdriver or sander 
• Report: https://businessagility.institute/learn/from-constraints-to-capabilities/756

In your experience, how significant has 'whole team' codebase ownership been to the success/failure of projects?

• “Failureship”
  • Individuals aim to “look good” pursuing their own
  • Risk managed organisation - looks for success of the whole organisation - sacrifice your own success
  • theitriskmanager.wordpress.com or the https://papachrismatts.uk/public-speaking/ the risk managed versus risk averse talk
  • Alicia Juarrero - https://www.goodreads.com/search?utf8=✓&q=Alicia+Juarrero&search_type=books
  • Karl Weick - https://www.goodreads.com/search?utf8=✓&query=Karl+Weick
• Holding teams and individual to account - leadership isn’t doing this
• Leadership doesn't know what to do when there is a problem. To solve problems work with the team rather than giving a solution to the team.
• High trust vs low trust teams
• Taking responsibility as a programmer seriously.

'If you desire to best understand what agile is about, then best study XP.' - said Uncle Bob. What is your perspective on this?

• XP is necessary, but it’s not enough
• Did Bob Martin take XPers into a ghetto of developers? i.e. software craftsmanship?
• No one is teaching the middle layer of management. The middle layer needs support from leadership and training them to deal with “problem” people.

[Kevin Rutherford]

This is great, thanks Leon.

Sorry I missed a discussion about Uncle Bob too 😉, but I have a fever today...

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[Chris Matts]

Thank you all for a super interesting chat this morning.

Anyone who wants to get a bit of a deep dive into LLMs, this seems to be the current hot video. It's very informative. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xTGNNLPyMI

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/xp-manchester/CAGhP06%3D03tNJ6X7xKbWSifXBN7X6gBQ_%2Bqb_GJCmQu-dpUT_sQ%40mail.gmail.com.

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Regards

Chris Matts