Team Practice and Culture: Pairing, Review Culture, Trust and Psychological Safety

All courses / AI Developer / Module 4 / Chapter 21

Learning objectives

After the lesson the participant can:

• Explain why an assistant can be worked with in a pairing-like way but is not a second person
• Apply five review practices that keep review real when code is generated
• Design a trust ledger and an open log that never rank a named developer
• Draft a team practice agreement and run a blameless retrospective on AI-assisted work

Key concepts

An assistant is not a pair

An assistant supplies something like half of a pairing exchange, but it cannot be named, cannot explain a change a month later and cannot help revert it. The difference is the absence of someone who passes Name, Understand and Revert.

Trust ledger

A record kept by the team of outcomes by class of work and origin, with dates, showing where the tool was reliable and where it was not. Trust is calibrated, not maximised, and the ledger never ranks a developer.

The record, the count and the draft

Three points at which an assistant changes what speaking up risks: searchable prompts and run records, usage counts that developers will manage, and drafted defect reports that say less. Each is a rule a named leader sets.

The stop right

Anyone in the team may hold a merge, pause an agent run or ask for a change to be reverted, on a doubt they can state, without penalty if the doubt turns out to be unfounded.

Team practice agreement

The written, one-page form of the team's rules, stricter than the delegation profile and never looser, identified by the decision record that adopts it. It contains no clause a leader could use against a named person.

Interactive exercises

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

Teaching plan

Discussion

1. A reviewer may return a change as too large to understand. What happens today in your team to someone who says I cannot review this?
2. Disclosure of AI involvement is routine and has one purpose. What would make developers stop disclosing, and how would you notice?
3. The retrospective closes by asking what the team nearly did not say. Why is that question worth two minutes of silence?

Written exercise

Self-test

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

1. According to the chapter, what is the one purpose of disclosing in a pull request that an assistant or agent took part?

   1. To let the engineering manager compare how much each named developer uses the tool
   2. To tell the reviewer where to look harder and to feed the provenance record
   3. To reduce the number of approvals a generated change needs
   4. To assign liability to the tool's supplier if the change fails
   Show the answer

   B. To tell the reviewer where to look harder and to feed the provenance record
   Disclosure is routine and has one purpose: it tells the reviewer where to look harder and feeds the provenance record. It is not a mark against the author, and the count of disclosures per person is never reported to anyone.

2. Which of these is part of the chapter's response to shadow AI?

   1. Monitoring of each named developer's network traffic
   2. A ban on all assistants until a tender has closed
   3. A report route that costs nothing for someone who pasted what they should not have
   4. A ranking of teams by the number of unapproved tools found
   Show the answer

   C. A report route that costs nothing for someone who pasted what they should not have
   The four parts are an approved route that does the job, a plain rule on what is never pasted, a conversation before any enforcement, and a report route that costs nothing. None is surveillance of individuals.

3. How does the team practice agreement relate to the delegation profile?

   1. It is stricter than the profile and never looser
   2. It replaces the profile for the team that adopts it
   3. It may raise a ceiling when the whole team agrees
   4. It applies only to external members of the team
   Show the answer

   A. It is stricter than the profile and never looser
   The agreement writes the team's rules on one page, is stricter than the delegation profile and never looser, and is identified by its decision record: AIDR-1121 at Nordvik Region and AIDR-1171 at Hansa Mutual.