Ruthlessly Helpful

A very big thank you to AgileDC 2025 for hosting our presentation yesterday. Fadi Stephan and I gave a talk titled, “Back to the Future – A look back at Agile Engineering Practices and their Future with AI” offered our experience and perspective on a few important questions:

• As a developer, if AI is writing the code, what’s my role?
• As a coach, are the technical practices I’ve been evangelizing for years still relevant?
• Do we still care about quality engineering?
• Do we still need to follow design best practices?
• What about techniques like Test-Driven Development (TDD) and pairing?

Agile Engineering with AI

I want to thank Fadi for co-presenting and for the hard work he put in to our discussing, debating, and deliberating on the topic of Agile Engineering with AI. Our work together continues to shape my thinking on software development. I will have a follow-on blog post that covers our presentation in depth.

If you are interested in learning about AI TDD, or building quality products with AI, or other advanced topics, then I recommend you check out the Kaizenko offerings:

1. Build
2. Innovate
3. Lead
4. Transform

I highly recommend Fadi’s coaching and training. It’s top shelf. It’s practical, hands-on, and it’s the best place to start to elevate your know-how and get to the next level.

Check out all that Fadi does here: https://www.kaizenko.com/

Coding with AI

These days I’m doing a lot of Coding with AI, which you can see on my YouTube channel, @stephenritchie4462. You’ll find various playlists of interest. For the Coding with AI playlist, I basically record myself performing an AI-assisted development task. I try ideas out in a variety ways, as a way to explore. If you are an AI skeptic, I recommend experimenting just to see how being an AI Explorer feels. I was surprised by how interesting and useful and fun coding with AI can be.

Sessions I Attended

First, I attended the keynote speech by Zuzana “Zuzi” Šochová on “Organizational Guide to Business Agility”. I enjoyed many of the ideas that Zuzi brought out:

• Start with a clear strategic purpose: Agility is how you achieve it, not why your org exists.
• Leadership is a mindset, not a title; anyone can step up, take responsibility, and model new behaviors.
• Combine adaptive governance with cultural shifts because being too rigid kills growth, and being too loose breeds chaos.
• Transformation isn’t a big bang; it’s iterative. Take tiny steps, inspect and adapt, retain a system-level awareness.
• Enable radical transparency, shared decision-making, and leader–leader dynamics to scale trust and autonomy.

Note that AgileDC is on her Top 10 Agile conferences to attend in 2025.

Then I attended the Sponsor Panel discussion on The State of Agile in the DC Region. A lot of thought provoking discussion with both a somber yet hopeful tone. The DC region is certainly undergoing changes and managing the transition will be hard.

For Session 1, I attended Industrial Driven Development (IDD) by Jim Damato and Pete Oliver-Krueger. For me industrialization is a fascinating topic. It’s about building the machine that builds the machine. In other words, manufacturing a part or product in the physical world requires engineers to build a system of machines that build the part or product. I am amazed at what their consulting work has accomplished with regard to shortening lead times.

Next, I attended Delivering value with Impact by Andrew Long. This was the most thought provoking session of the day. I particularly liked the useful metaphors on connecting Action to Customer to Behavior to Impact. There were several key insight related to using customer behavior change as a leverage point to increase the business impact your receive from your team’s actions.

After a hardy lunch and catching up with Sean George, I attended the Middle guard in Midgard… session by David Fogel. The topic is related to how the Old Guard (fixed mindset) and the New Guard (growth mindset) represent two different camps found in the Agile transformation. Midguard is the present reality. So, as an Agile Coach you’re in the present reality of working with the Middle Guard, who are a mix of both fixed mindset reservations and growth mindset desires. After the topic was introduced, it was facilitated using “Pass the cards” per Jean Tabaka (or the 35 Shuffle technique), which was a masterclass in how to use dot voting efficiently in a workshop. A lot of good knowledge sharing.

Next, I attended AI Pair Programming: Human-Centered Development in the Age of Vibe Coding by George Lively. From my software engineering perspective, what I learned here will provide the most grist for my follow-on learning and experimentation. What George showed us was his excellent experiment and the demonstration of how AI-assisted software development can both accelerate delivery and be well managed. He applied static code analysis, test code coverage, quality metrics, and DORA metrics in a way that shows how AI Pair Programming can work well.

Next was Fadi and I at the 3:15pm session. As I mentioned above, I will blog separately on our session topic.

Finally, I sat in on Richard Cheng‘s From Painful to Powerful: Sprint Planning & Sprint Review That Actually Work session. Richard has an excellent way of explaining the practical application of the Scrum Framework. He takes the concepts and framework and gives clear advice on how to improve the events, such as Sprint Planning and Sprint Review. In this session, he reminded me of some of the pitfalls that trip me up to this day; I need to stop forgetting how to avoid them. The session showcased why Richard is an excellent Certified Scrum Trainer (CST), and his training never disappoints. Check out his offerings: https://www.agilityprimesolutions.com/training

As many of you might know, Richard and I used to co-train (though I was never on an equal footing) when we both worked together at the training org that is now Sprightbulb Learning.

Stay in Touch

In addition to attending sessions and learning a lot, it was great to catch up with friends and former colleagues who attended the conference. Some I hadn’t seen in years. A big highlight of AgileDC are the connections and reconnections in the DC area’s Agile community.

You’ll find Fadi on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fadistephan/

You’ll find my LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sritchie/

Take care, please stay in touch, and I hope to see you next time!