i don’t want “accelerated”, “increased-speed” or “fast-paced” research. in fact, am not interested in any shortcuts to mindful, intentional, and slow science

Non-Blocking Code Reviews at #AgileOnTheBeach2026 The slides are available online. Thank you all for the lovely feedback. It’s been delightful ☺️ thinkinglabs.io/talks/2024/0...

Non-Blocking Continuous Code Reviews - a Case Study

thinkinglabs.io

@tdpauw.bsky.social is next up at #AgileOnTheBeach2026 talking about non blocking code reviews. Why are we doing it anyway? 1/n

On my way to Agile in the Beach #AOTB Second time since 2020. Tomorrow I’m presenting a case on non-blocking code reviews. agileonthebeach.com

"To conclude, the tech industry spent decades trying to fix management processes, only to realise they were fighting a losing battle against the structural gravity of Conway’s Law and its implications on innovation and market leadership. Mediocrity is the default. Success is optional. Just saying …"

Trunk-Based Thierry (they/them)@tdpauw.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Is Conway's Law just a hunch? Or is it a law? Conway didn't provide a proof in 1968. But decades later, academic research confirms the hypothesis. Part 2 of "Beyond the Shades of Conway's Law" has been published. Validation: The Research & Reality Check thinkinglabs.io/articles/202...

Is Conway's Law just a hunch? Or is it a law? Conway didn't provide a proof in 1968. But decades later, academic research confirms the hypothesis. Part 2 of "Beyond the Shades of Conway's Law" has been published. Validation: The Research & Reality Check thinkinglabs.io/articles/202...

Beyond the Shades of Conway's Law - Validation: The Research & Reality Check

thinkinglabs.io

Published: Beyond the Shades of Conway's Law - Foundations: The Origin & The Mirroring Principle How the communities of Product Design and Organisation Design independently made similar observations to Conway's Law, introducing The Mirroring Principle. thinkinglabs.io/articles/202...

Beyond the Shades of Conway's Law - Foundations: The Origin & The Mirroring Principle

thinkinglabs.io

I regularly have people ask me about Mythos these days, so here are my thoughts: Finding bugs is never the hard part. Fixing them is. How’s your organizational alignment? Are your engineers burned out? How is your production resilience? Before you worry about the new shiny, focus on your basics

I'm starting a new series on Conway's Law 🙈 Published: Beyond the Shades of Conway's Law What started as merely note-taking in the form of "Shades of Conway's Law" became a talk, with additional reading, research, and more connections. This is work in progress 😅 thinkinglabs.io/articles/202...

Beyond the Shades of Conway's Law

thinkinglabs.io

Published: Don’t Let AI Invert The Testing Pyramid AI has not changed a single thing about the mechanics of software delivery. The fundamental principles, including the Testing Pyramid, are still valid and necessary. thinkinglabs.io/articles/202...

Don’t Let AI Invert The Testing Pyramid

thinkinglabs.io

Revisiting @stevesmithtech.bsky.social's Continuous Delivery patterns. some good patterns to abstract away app technology from the pipeline www.stevesmith.tech/blog/tag/pat...

And I can fit XP inside pretty much any less iterative methodology. Sure, we'll give you a detailed architecture plan. * starts reverse-engineering releases into a UML model *

Two reasons: 1. I didn't want to spend 2-3 decades sitting in meetings, and b. It's in the inner feedback loops when changes tend to have the most leverage. I can "Agile" your team at a fraction of the cost of trying to "Agile" your boss.

But, compliance! Somehow, a welcome justification for all the superfluous gates in our software delivery process, and to embarrassingly uphold the unreasonable delays. (1/3)

I will be speaking at @fosdem.org in the Testing and Continuous Delivery dev room next weekend. Non-Blocking Continuous Code Reviews at 12:05 on Sunday First time speaking at FOSDEM fosdem.org/2026/schedul...

FOSDEM 2026 - Non-Blocking Continuous Code Reviews

fosdem.org

Published: Coping Mechanisms for Introverts thinkinglabs.io/articles/202...

Coping Mechanisms for Introverts

thinkinglabs.io

A while back, someone attempted to make the case for code reviews as a better alternative to sharing knowledge over Pair Programming. The main arguments put forward were economics, poor feedback and least-common-denominator performance. Let me debunk that 🚀 thinkinglabs.io/articles/202...

On the Effectiveness of Pair Programming

thinkinglabs.io

Published: What is Continuous Delivery? It takes nine principles, one heuristic, three foundations, one pattern and three practices to practice truly Continuous Delivery. thinkinglabs.io/articles/202...

What is Continuous Delivery?

thinkinglabs.io

Let's talk about failed IT projects ... Remember how agile methodologies were introduced to exactly counter that. You would think that failed IT projects are a thing of the past. Hell not! Good article on the state of IT in 2025. It's not pretty! (credit DORA) spectrum.ieee.org/it-managemen...

Trillions Spent and Big Software Projects Are Still Failing

Why do software failures persist despite soaring IT budgets? Dive into the complexities that keep success elusive.

spectrum.ieee.org

If you asked me to characterise software development in its essence, I'd say it's a process of reducing uncertainty. Otherwise known as "learning". codemanship.wordpress.com/2025/11/28/w...

We Don’t Out-Deliver The Competition. We Outlearn them.

I’ve long considered software development as a process of removing uncertainty. The customer asks us for “Instagram, but for cats” – which could have infinite possible inter…

codemanship.wordpress.com

The art and skills for delivering software in much more smaller incremental steps were lost with the global adoption of Pull Requests.

There’s also the other way around, where management says they tried OKRs and found that they ‘don’t work’, so you can’t introduce them. So you agree, and instead talk to the team about your ‘goals’ and ‘success measures’ 😶

OKRs is like Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. Everybody says they do it. But in reality don’t🤷

I’ve heard @tdpauw.bsky.social talk about this before, and it clicked instantly — totally agree. But every time I share this idea, people look at me like I’ve just declared code reviews are a myth from ancient folklore. 😂

Slack channels are a good indicator of silos in an organisation 🤷

“Anyone who believes code reviews catch bugs, believes in fairytales” Automated and exploratory tests catches bugs… Code reviews help lower the risk that we release low quality code. @tdpauw.bsky.social #agilecam

What code reviews should not be: * Ways to exercise power - it should be true peer reviews * Done by seniors missing mentoring skills * blaming or harming * a miserable experience * gate keeping (gates introduce delays) * a must @tdpauw.bsky.social #agilecam

It was two days of interesting talks and workshops, where three stood out to me: First was “Non-blocking continuous code-reviews, a case story” by @tdpauw.bsky.social I always enjoy hearing Thierry’s talks. He provides great insight in various ways of getting higher quality code :)

I answered over @ sw-development-is.social/@TheTravelle... ➙ For more about trunk-based dev, I suggest @tdpauw.bsky.social's article thinkinglabs.io/articles/2025/… He wrote more great articles about the topic. There's even a VCS that doesn't use branches: Jujutsu ➙ jj-vcs.github.io/jj/latest/

Nudging is not going to fix our lack of understanding basic principles. #justsaying 🤷