AI is reshaping agile teams but collaboration matters more than ever - Mountain Goat Software

"Everyone today seems eager to talk about how AI is accelerating software development. Teams are shipping faster. Individuals are more productive. Entire backlogs can be written in minutes. Estimates are a click away. Code that once took days now materializes in minutes. With all this newfound speed, it's understandable that teams and leaders start asking whether they still need the same kinds of collaboration-or even the same kinds of teams."

"The faster a team moves, the more collaboration it requires. The more productive individual contributors become, the more their work needs to be coordinated. And the more powerful AI becomes as a tool, the more dangerous it is when someone uses it in isolation. Put simply, AI amplifies everything-including misalignment. Unfortunately, many teams are responding to AI by collaborating less. And that is where things begin to fall apart."

"Over the last few years, I've watched teams adopt AI tools in ways that unintentionally reduce communication. Developers can now accomplish huge amounts of work on their own. Product Owners can use AI to generate and split backlog items or even prioritize whole roadmaps. Teams start to believe they no longer need to talk as often because the tooling is doing so much of the work."

AI is dramatically accelerating software development, enabling faster shipping, higher individual productivity, and rapid generation of backlogs, estimates, code, and tests. Increased speed and individual output create a greater need for coordinated collaboration and strong teams. Powerful AI used in isolation amplifies misalignment and becomes more dangerous without alignment. Many teams respond by reducing communication, relying on AI to generate stories, split backlog items, and prioritize roadmaps. That behavior leads teams to operate as collections of individuals, with meetings becoming thin and surface-level and collaboration outside meetings declining. Agile leaders must prioritize sustaining and improving team collaboration.

Read at Mountaingoatsoftware