It’s been a moment! COVID disrupted a lot of things, not least my writing. More recently I’ve been busy with my new employment with the amazing Assent, focusing on sustainability in manufacturing supply chains. It’s deeply meaningful work and I’m enjoying it enormously.

It’s great to be on the coal face coding again, and I’ve got another post in the back of my head about Agile and the technology that backs it – it’s been amazing to watch this organization change and iterate from two-weekly releases to continuous deployment and dozens of releases every day. Certainly one of the most successful transformations I’ve been involved with! And always ongoing…

Today though I’m looking back at this blog post on “Conversational Patterns in BDD”, where I introduced two ideas:

Context Questioning: “Is there any other context which, when this event happens, will produce a different outcome?”

Outcome Questioning: “Given this context, when this event happens, is there another outcome that’s important? Something we missed, perhaps?”

It occurred to me during a refinement session yesterday that there’s now a third question we need to ask. I’m going to call it “Interaction Questioning”.

Interaction Questioning: “Given the behaviour that results in the outcome, is there any point where a human should confirm choices or decisions being made?”

This isn’t just because of AI, but because when you’re working with with large quantities of data, automated decision-making is essential… but you might want a human being to confirm that that’s really what they meant to have happen.

And of course, it’s because of AI.