Continuous Stewardship - effective, humane services enriched by software - Fast Flow Conf 2024 - London - Matthew Skelton

In an age of AI-generated software services which have increasingly life-altering effects on humans, how can we promote effective ongoing evolution of software-enriched services?

Software services are now essential infrastructure for many or most parts of our lives: utility meters, banking, benefits payments, insulin pumps, pension funds, hospital management, travel, and many more everyday services all rely on software to operate and access. This software must work well 24x7 in a resilient, secure, and user-friendly way, and must continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Gone are the days of a “project” that delivers a “finished” software product. In fact, a project that assumes a neat “ending” for software development is probably foolish or even dangerous for people using the system, because a project optimizes for completion, not ongoing evolution. Instead, organizations that care deeply about outcomes for users are moving towards an approach of continuous evolution of the software. All aspects of the software delivery are treated as continuous: funding, team responsibility, delivery, testing, discovery, and design.

The emerging approach of Continuous Stewardship - drawing on practices from Team Topologies, agile, DevOps, learning design, service design, psychological safety, active knowledge diffusion, and UX - aims to provide “continuity of care” for the software services on an ongoing basis, preserving and evolving the codified business intent in a way that respects the needs of users.

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From a talk given at FastFlowConf 2024 - https://fastflowconf.com/

Transcript

1. Continuous Stewardship effective, humane services enriched by software Matthew Skelton, CEO at Conflux and Team Topologies matthewskelton.com Fast Flow Conf, London | 10 September 2024 K303
2. Matthew Skelton holistic innovation Originator of Adapt Together™ by Conflux Co-author of Team Topologies matthewskelton.com 4
3. Team Topologies Organizing business and technology teams for fast flow Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais IT Revolution Press, September 2019 Order via stores worldwide: teamtopologies.com/book 5
4. Moving towards an entrepreneurial ecosystem + “non-profit core” 6 5 years since publication of ‘Team Topologies’
5. Challenge: How to promote effective ongoing evolution of software-enriched services on which humans increasingly depend? 7
6. A quick history of software 8
7. 9 Lyons tea houses
8. 10 Codebreaking at Bletchley Park
9. 11 IBM System/360 mainframe
10. 12 [IBM] PC + Windows
11. 13 Celebs posing with computers in the 90s : r/popculturechat (Reddit) 🤷
12. 14 Fast fashion and influencer grift
13. The reality of modern software services in 2024+ 15
14. 16 13k advertising screens with facial recognition & micro-targeting
15. 17 56,000 home robot cleaners
16. 18 1m sensors across 100 workplaces
17. 19 650 smart fabric suits for firefighters
18. 20 Pension payments
19. 21 Winter fuel payments
20. 22 2000 tractors ( + 1 solar storm )
21. 23 1500 crop sensors via LoRaWAN
22. 24 100 robots picking fruit in a vertical farm
23. 25 14,000 digital insulin pumps
24. 26 Hospital management
25. 27 AI systems for cancer screening https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/10.1148/radiol.222176
26. 28 GenAI writing and deploying software autonomously 28
27. 29 Modern software-enriched services have increasingly life-altering effects on humans
28. But… 30
30. Problem #1: “done” Countless organizations worldwide are sleepwalking to failure by applying the “done” mindset and other 20th Century techniques to 21st Century software-enriched services. 32
31. Problem #2: “faster codegen” Organizations are rushing to deploy GenAI but ignoring decades of proven practices in software engineering for fast flow, decoupling, technical debt, operational effectiveness, ... 33
32. 34 Failure modes can be life-ruining 34
33. 35 Failure modes can be life-threatening 35
34. 36 We need a holistic approach to evolving software-enriched services that fits the increasingly life-altering effects on humans
35. Problem mindset #1: “done” 37
36. 38 “On-time, on-scope, on-budget”
37. 39 “Once the XYZ project is done… ”
38. 40 “... software factory… ”
39. 41 “Just get this over the line”
40. 42 “We can swarm on tasks that need to be done”
41. 43 “Give developers some variety in work… ”
42. 44 “... a pool of fungible resources … ”
43. Problems with “done” 45
44. “On-time, on-scope, on-budget” 46 ⏱📋💰 No expectation of learning No expectation of discovery of new things
45. “Once the XYZ project is done… ” 47 📦 Ignores a whole set of things that need to continue
46. “... software factory… ” 48 🏭 Mechanistic view of what software is, with few or slow feedback loops
47. “Just get this over the line” 49 🏉 Increase rework later and damage the viability now
48. “We can swarm on tasks that need to be done” 50 🐝🍯 Crucial domain context is lost and ignored
49. “Give developers some variety in work… ” 51 🍨 Development is typically the smallest cost
50. “... a pool of fungible resources … ” 52 🤖 Knowledge of long-term aspects is lost
51. 53 Problem #1: many people still think that software will be “done”
52. Problem mindset #2: “generate code faster” with GenAI 54
53. 55 “Humans are the bottleneck in creating code”
54. 56 “GenAI can decide what services to create and deploy”
55. 57 “We’ll get an advantage if we get to market quicker”
56. 58 “We’ll just get the GenAI to generate a new version… ”
57. 59 “We’ll let the LLM decide what services to provide”
58. Problems with “faster codegen” 60
59. “Humans are the bottleneck in creating code” 61 ⌨ The bottleneck is understanding, not typing, and GenAI does not understand anything.
60. “GenAI can decide what services to create and deploy” 62 🤖 GenAI does not understand business domains, but humans can help to shape the codegen constraints (prompts).
61. “We’ll get an advantage if we get to market quicker” 63 🏁 Maybe, but at what long-term cost, with 100 million lines of unmaintainable code? Technical debt in AI-enabled systems: On the prevalence, severity, impact, and management strategies for code and architecture Recupito et al, 2024 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0164121224001961#sec4
62. “We’ll just get the GenAI to generate a new version… ” 64 🎇 Have you not heard of data migration, backwards compatibility, referential integrity, …?
63. “We’ll let the LLM decide what services to provide” 65 🤡 Software is “just” encoding of organizational intent. HUmans need to discover and curate that intent over time.
64. 66 Problem #2: many people are going to use GenAI to generate massive amounts of code that gives a rapid start but is un-evolvable
65. Start with the premise that services need to evolve for 10+, 20+, 30+ years and work backwards to needed practices 67
66. What would we expect to see if we focused on continuity of care for software-enriched services? 68
67. 69 Stewardship & curation
68. 70 Long-lived, autonomous teams with ongoing context
69. 71 Design for team cognitive/mental load
70. 72 Continuous ‘untangling’ of business concepts
71. 73 Funding that encourages stewardship
72. 74 Supplier contracts that align to stewardship
73. 75 Ongoing (re-)alignment of mission, skills, intent, trust
74. 76 Ongoing investment in the health of the codebase
75. 77 Continuous inspection of the organizational ‘wiring’
76. 78 Service design thinking across the organization https://www.linkedin.com/posts/johnpcutler_when-two-people-happ en-to-have-kate-tarling-activity-7135644226674950144-NAjC/
77. As software-enriched services become ubiquitous and life-altering, a radical mindset of continuous stewardship is needed to unlock decision-making for success. 79
78. Team Topologies provides a firm foundation for Continuous Stewardship but other things are also needed… 80
80. 82 “With the explicit platform strategy [based on Team Topologies], we simplified upfront planning … for the whole organization. Defined interaction models between teams streamlined execution with just enough collaboration.” – Maksim Koutun, Director of Engineering @ Flo Health teamtopologies.com/flo
81. 83 organize for fast flow of value We help product, technology and engineering leaders design high-impact team-of-teams organizations. teamtopologies.com
83. 85 “The way that the Conflux crew used their active knowledge diffusion approach to seek out and champion good practices was a real revelation to us at TELUS and helped to shift thinking around how we innovate and share successes.” – Steven Tannock, Director, Architecture (Platform Technology & Tools) at TELUS Digital
84. 86 Thriving organizations, delivering at speed™ Create alignment, trust, and engagement across your organization whilst delivering at pace with fast flow. adapttogether.info
86. 88 + confluxhq.com/codescene
88. 90 + confluxhq.com/teamos
89. [ new book (?) ] [Kate Tarling and Matthew Skelton] 91
91. Continuous Stewardship is the prudent and humane response to the pervasiveness of software in our lives. 93
92. Version control Continuous Integration Continuous Delivery Iterative, agile methods DDD Observability Team Topologies Psychological Safety 94
93. The aim Create a strong “pull” towards more humane, effective operating models via a golden path for organizations stuck in 20th Century mindsets of “done” and “faster codegen” 95
94. Challenge: How to promote effective ongoing evolution of software-enriched services on which humans increasingly depend? 96
95. As software-enriched services become ubiquitous and life-altering, a radical mindset of continuous stewardship is needed to unlock decision-making for success. 97
96. Start with the premise that services need to evolve for 10+, 20+, 30+ years and work backwards to needed practices 98
97. Team Topologies provides a firm foundation for Continuous Stewardship but other things are also needed… 99
98. Continuous Stewardship is the prudent and humane response to the pervasiveness of software in our lives. 100
99. ContinuousStewardship.com 101 Join the discussion:
100. 102 The Adapt Together™ approach from Conflux creates alignment, trust, and engagement across your organization whilst delivering at pace with fast flow. adapttogether.info Team Topologies is the leading approach to organizing business and technology teams for fast flow, providing a practical, step-by‑step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction. teamtopologies.com
101. thank you 103 matthewskelton.com