What Developers Did Before: Craft, Waterfall, Agile, DevOps and Open Source

All courses / AI Developer / Module 1 / Chapter 2

Learning objectives

After the lesson the participant can:

Explain which scarcity each practice in the lineage answered and what it left unanswered
Compare how earlier automation of code differs from generative AI in determinism and reach
Review what the two time-use studies measured and the limits of each
Draft a practice inventory that marks each practice as evidenced, not evidenced or lapsed

Key concepts

Scarcity answered by a practice: The chapter's reading of the lineage: craft answered skill, structured programming the ability to reason about code, waterfall predictability, agile feedback, DevOps production feedback and ownership, open source the effort to write common parts, and platform engineering cognitive load.
Layered practice: No practice replaced its predecessor. A team with two-week sprints still writes a requirements document when a tender requires it and still depends on open source, so real teams, including both example organisations, carry several layers at once.
You build it, you run it: The ownership idea behind DevOps: a team that is paged for its service has an answer to who owns it that does not depend on a document. The stewardship principle of Chapter 4 generalises it.
Role charter as code: A versioned artefact in the repository with a mandate, accountabilities, decision rights and evidence, changed through a pull request. Unlike a role description, which lists activities, it states what a person answers for and may stop.

Interactive exercises

Do them here and get feedback at once. Choose a card and then where it belongs, or drag it.

Interactive exercise 1 · Put in order

The lineage of development practice

Put these practices in the order in which the chapter's lineage dates their arrival, earliest first.

Interactive exercise 2 · Match

What each practice left unanswered

Match each practice to what the chapter's table says it left unanswered.

Teaching plan

15 min	Lecture with the table of seven practices: period, scarcity answered, what was left unanswered and the developer function most affected.
10 min	The teacher presents the two time-use studies and the room discusses why their figures must not be put in one chart.
10 min	Participants read the pre-AI job description for a senior developer at Nordvik Region and mark what in it could be checked.
20 min	Exercise: pairs take a practice inventory for one team and mark the status of each practice.
5 min	Wrap-up: which lapsed practice would matter most if the volume of change doubled.

Discussion

Which practice in your team has outlived the scarcity it answered, and which answers a scarcity that AI is about to make worse?
The chapter says a role description can be satisfied by a developer who accepts everything an assistant offers. What would have to be in the charter to prevent that?
Both organisations will meet AI on top of their oldest layer first. Why is that where the backlog is, and what does it mean for ownership?

Written exercise

Exercise · 20 minutes

A practice inventory for one team

Follow the practical guide for one team you know or for the case platform team of Nordvik Region. List the practices the team runs by what it does, not by what it calls itself: how work is specified, designed, reviewed, tested, released and owned. Place each practice in the lineage, state in the team's own words the scarcity it answered, and mark its status as in force and evidenced, in force and not evidenced, or lapsed, where evidence means a record and not a recollection. Add the developer function each practice serves and whether a Mode 0 feature already touches it.

Deliverable: A dated practice inventory with at least six practices, each with lineage, scarcity, status, function and a review date.

Your work

Self-test

Choose an answer to see whether it is right, or open the answer below each question.

In the chapter's table of the lineage, what did agile and Extreme Programming leave unanswered?
Show the answer
C. The durability of knowledge and the ownership of code
The chapter says agile answered feedback and tolerance of change and left durability unanswered: documentation valued below working software is missing later, and shared ownership can become ownership by no one.
What did the logging study by Meyer and colleagues of 20 professional developers find about coding?
Show the answer
A. Coding took 21.0 per cent of the logged time, the largest single share but a minority of the day
The study reports coding at 21.0 per cent, email at 14.5 per cent and work-related browsing at 11.4 per cent. The 58 per cent figure is from the other study and concerns program comprehension.
In what two respects does the chapter say generative AI differs from compilers, frameworks and earlier code generation?
Show the answer
D. Its output is not deterministic and its reach across the developer's work is wider
The chapter names two differences: the same input no longer guarantees the same code, and the reach is wider, since it can draft requirements, tests, reviews and documentation as well as code.