标签：#Teamwork

Brad Grantham discusses how software engineers and architects can transition from individual contributors to influential technical leaders. Brad shares actionable insights on expanding skills into business and legal domains, adapting communication styles for non-technical stakeholders, moving past ego to empower teams, and navigating complex organizational dynamics to maximize engineering impact. By Brad Grantham

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to David Gudeman about the unique culture of early-stage startup engineering, how founder personality quirks and premature process impositions can derail teams, and how engineers can build influence and make deliberate career choices without formal power. By David Gudeman

Every team I've worked with has unwritten rules — who to ask before touching auth, which decisions are settled, what "in progress" actually means. They used to travel by osmosis. Once everyone on the team is coding with an agent, osmosis stops working, because half the conversation now happens in someone's private session. This is the one-page agreement we ended up writing down, and why each clause is in it. When every developer on a team codes with an AI agent, one of the first things to break down can be the unwritten rules. Small, shared assumptions that once traveled through everyday conversation ("ask before you touch auth," "we decided on v2 last week") may not reach a teammate's private session — let alone the agent working in it. The established fix for that is a working agreement : a short, explicit set of norms a team writes for itself. This one is designed for AI-assisted teams — a page you can copy, adapt, and keep somewhere every teammate can access and every agent is configured to read. What a working agreement is — and isn't A working agreement is a team norm, written by the team, kept short, and revised as you learn. It is not a tool, and not a policy handed down from above. It doesn't enforce anything — it aligns behavior. That's precisely why it survives across whatever mix of editors and agents your team actually uses: it lives at the human layer, above any one tool. If you've run agile ceremonies, you've seen these before. What's new is that agents now perform part of the work, so a few assumptions that people may have absorbed implicitly need to be written down. Accountability still stays with people. The template Copy this, cut what doesn't fit, and fill in the blanks. Keep it to a page. # Our AI Coding Working Agreement (v1) ## 1. Shared decisions - Decisions that affect others live in: ______ (a shared memory, a decisions doc). - Before a decision affects someone else's work, we record who decided it, what changed, and why. ## 2. Declaring wo

This is the Engineering Culture Trends Report for 2026. Featuring a panel of QCon speakers and InfoQ contributors, they discussed AI adoption maturity and risk, the transformation of engineering team structures and roles, and the human dimensions of software development that must not be lost in 2026. By Ben Linders, Rafiq Gemmail, Craig Smith, Vanessa Formicola, Shawna Martell, Phillip Mortimer, Yinka Omole

This report summarizes how the InfoQ Culture and Methods editorial team sees the ongoing and emergent trends in the culture and methods space in 2026. By Shane Hastie, Ben Linders, Vanessa Formicola, Shawna Martell, Rafiq Gemmail, Craig Smith, Phillip Mortimer, Yinka Omole

AI is an amplifier; strategic focus on the organizational system brings the greatest returns. DORA's 2025 research on AI in software development provides team profiles and success capabilities that can be used to put the research into practice. By Ben Linders

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods spoke to Craig McLuckie, co-creator of Kubernetes and CEO of Stacklok, about the impact of AI coding tools on open source communities and engineering teams, designing deliberate organisational culture, and navigating evolving career paths for engineers in the age of AI. By Craig McLuckie