Moving away from Agile. What's next? (Category Processes)

Looked pretentious. report McKinsey guys with a recent AI Engineer confa in which they revealed a few key thoughts

• Current operating models (Agile based) Poorly reveal the potential of AI tools AI-native teams differ in workflow, roles and metrics Moving away from Agile is primarily about organizational and cultural change, not the use of tools

The theses that support their thoughts are based on the following: We have a gap between the individual boost of engineers and the effect on the company: individual developers get an acceleration of “days → minutes”, and on average the company sees only one thing. 5–15Percentage increase in productivity because the rest of the process is old. AI creates new bottlenecks: the distribution of tasks between people and agents, manual code revision in the avalanche of generated code, accelerated accumulation of tech debt and complexity.

• The old agile-setup. (8–10 Man, two-week sprints, story-driven dev, separate roles frontend, backend, qa, ...) Optimized for "purely human" development and poorly combined with agent use

Interestingly, the title of the report itself looks like a byte – the authors don’t really suggest “throwing out agile,” but rather they suggest moving away from a specific implementation with two-week sprints, “two-pizza teams” and other rituals. Instead, they offer an AI native approach: shorter cycles, smaller teams, spec-driven development, and a change in the role of product manager and engineers.

It’s generally fun to watch consultants talk about development — I’m not sure they’ve ever written code, so they base their helicopter view analysis on a bunch of different studies and case studies. Well, they think not from the level of a team, but from the level of a portfolio of hundreds of teams: a lot of talk about change management, measurement, the role of learning, restructuring the organizational structure. It's a consulting view, but it's useful when it comes to large corporations:)​​

In more detail about the changes, they suggest Moving from quarterly planning to continuous planning Moving from story-driven to spec-driven development – PM/lead first “knock out” the normal specification along with the agent, and then the team/agents cut the code to reduce refactors and overgeneration.

• Go to the teams. 3-5 a person where the participants are more like full-stack engineers, as well as orchestrate agents and are responsible for parts of the architecture, not just their layer Go to products that you start prototyping with a coding agent, not just writing long PRDs (product requirement definitions)

The authors talk about metrics for measuring the effect, offering a multi-level system. Investment in tools, training, coaching Adoption, velocity, capacity, MTTR for critical bugs, code security and quality Business results: time-to-revenue, cost-benefit analysis, opportunity to reinvest in greenfield/brownfield

In general, consultants suggest changing the whole process, rather than just putting agents and copilot on old agile processes.

#Engineering #AI #Metrics #Software #DevEx #Productivity #Management #Leadership