A personal reflection on the evolution of Agile practices, noting the shift from innovation to widespread adoption, and emphasizes the need for grit and wisdom as the field matures and practices become mainstream.

This might or might not age well..#AI is entering organisations and people start using it. Everyone is excited and hoping all the analysis for IT solutions implementation will no longer be needed, and results will materialize sooner, with less testing and less work woth IT. Yet, soon we discover that predictable results need adequate prompting, and fast we learn about system prompts and RAG and others alike.

We constantly seek to add more, but true improvement involves noticing what we leave out. Negative space highlights untouched areas, helping us consciously assess priorities and opportunities for growth.

There are more than 15 years for me working with teams, helping them become better at reaching their goals, delivering more impact and being happier overall. Some call it agile, but I like to think of it just like "do work better".  I started myself to learn about this while working in software testing, attempting to test better, to understand how to build a set of heuristics for consistent problem exploration.

"Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man" - Martin Heidegger "The limits of my language means the limits of my world" - Ludwig Wittgenstein Some time ago I've become student for an online course I wish I've taken on earlier, the Cynefin Foundations one. Even from the first chapter, the course designer's (among them being one person I highly regard, Dave Snowden) places a big emphasis on language and its importance when learning.

AI might be the best companion for humans, helping us build a strong attention skill. So, in the end, the question relies around what AI will enhance in humans. Will AI make us more focused or it will take us further in the attention drift?

We often believe someone else—smarter or more capable—will fix problems, but it’s up to us. Delegation can be downward, upward, or, most sneakily, to our future selves, fueling procrastination. #selfleadership #procrastination

Some time ago I attended Romania's first Agile Coach Camp edition. It was refreshing and nice to meet people eager to come open with their daily problems, trusting the group, while seeking useful insights and advices that would otherwise be hard to get.  One of the open space sessions that grabbed my attention was about risk management while working with an Agile mindset in a highly regulated and restrictive environment (in this case investment banking). 

I have been an actor in and around teams working based on Agile principles for many years by now. There seems to be a recurring question that I have got many times from people new to this way of working. As one of the basic traits of a team working within Agile principles is TRANSPARENCY, every work item should be visible.

I have kids and I love them! As they grow, I learn along the way various steps and stages of learning & development. It is no wonder that they say "you grow once more as your kids grow"... One of the recent realization has to do with something many of us take for granted and consider ubiquitous, that is reading and operating an analogue clock.

Today on a Slack group I really enjoy I found someone doing some research on content reach and content mechanics. As usual, there was a form to be filled in. Most questions were good, some made me revisit habits and some triggered me to write this post. The person behind the effort was clearly enthusiastic and willing to make something happen.

The type of work should determine how one's day of work looks like. There are fields where focused work is productive work, and there are fields where relational and networking work is productive work. Managers fall mostly in the second category. By their position, as interface elements in the organization they are supposed communicate and work more with other people to produce decisions and steer the makers.

Failure in complex systems is, like other types of behavior in such systems, emergent Perrow's model is a good example. In a recent project I realized that testing can act as a canary, as early test results indicate things are going not in the right direction. The project manager, was asking why these defects were raised during a team meeting as being important, and one of the more experienced testers mentioned that this is a smell of something not being done properly, that will fail down the line.

Richard Bradshaw (@FriendlyTester) Tweeted: Testers are so quick to negatively critique without a providing a single hint of positivity.  This felt so close to my heart and also knowing Richard personally I believe he also sees this as a sad part of the software tester role. I also believe positivity can be evolved, and my recent life events make me believe strongly in this.

Building on my previous post—“Return to office” or how one spring does not get in the box by itself…—I want to reflect on the current struggles organizations face as they attempt to bring employees back to the office in this latest phase of the post-pandemic era. I am not aiming to take sides. It’s clear that every approach—whether pushing for a rapid return, opting for flexibility, or supporting permanent remote work—has compelling arguments behind it.

"avoidance of failure is a better strategy than imitation of success" Dave Snowden Many times we try to reach success by imitation, and that goal is pursued vigorously. This looks a lot like trying to behave like something that we or our organisation is not alike, with our assumptions being that imitating all the visible moves will provide the same results.

While watching one of the supporting videos for a course I'm attending (online) the below line (approximatively) came up "Nature makes and deals the cards, but nurture plays them" (approximate quote) Dave Snowden This made me think of how education and approach have a very important role on how things turn up on both individual level as well as aggregated, up to organisational level.

This is an "impulse post", if there is such a thing. I call it like this because it's triggered by something I read at the playground, while watching my kids play (I know, some might say this is bad parenting, but reading a paper in the sun is quite soothing...). Now, to the point I am really happy reading a…

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13th and 14th-gen processors back under the spotlight

ETH Zurich and EPFL will release a large language model (LLM) developed on public infrastructure. Trained on the “Alps” supercomputer at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), the new LLM ma...

Leading American engineer and scientist Vannevar Bush thought that the memex was the answer to information nightmare of the 1940s.