AI turns the faucet wide open. More code, more output, better looking dashboards. But nobody's watching the bathtub. A systems thinking look at why more output isn't more value.

You prompted it. You shipped it. You own it. The lack of ownership is the real problem with AI vibe-coding. And it's also why quality suffers. Generating stuff by the dozens means nothing if you're absent from your own output.

AI gives your engineers x-time output. So you fire people. Push faster. Ship bugs with confidence. And watch your ops team burn at 2am. The defects didn't disappear. They just arrived later, at a higher cost. To the whole team and company. Slow down, zoom out and scale the whole system.

The best devs I know are lazy in the smart way. But AI is making us lazy in the dumb way. Like cleaning products that promise no scrubbing needed, we're skipping the elbow grease. Problem is, friction is how we learn. Time to learn how to distinguish necessary friction from unnecessary.

LLMs don't learn, they're not deterministic, and reviewing their output is a full-time job. Running multiple agents in parallel without proper supervision? That's not velocity. That's negligence with extra steps.

Vibe coding brought the old dev-tester silo back. Except now engineers are the ones getting half-baked deliverables thrown over the fence. One person + AI agents won't replace a cross-functional team. "You need the full package, man!" New post ✍️

Providing context to an AI is the same as describing the system in Systems Thinking. No context, generic answer. Good context, more useful answer. It's that simple. Because, you know, IT DEPENDS!

AI coding tools make Mount Stupid a very crowded place. Everyone thinks now they know how to build software. 10 years ago I talked TestBash Brighton about the Dunning-Kruger effect. Today this phenomenon has reached new heights. Thanks to everyone thinking they are now software engineers!

When you describe a model or a system, you tend to forget the influence of yourself. Of course, you don't draw yourself into the model. Your context (a big, invisible box) highly influences it.

Recently Systems Thinking gained more popularity. There was even a Ministry of Testing event around it. Most of the time I only hear or read that Systems Thinking is important and all the benefits of it. But nobody explained how to actually do it. I try to slightly close that gap.

Eine Rede, die Anerkennung verdient. In 1 Minute zeigt @ricardalang.bsky.social , wie man mit der AfD umgehen sollte und ja, sie spricht Friedrich Merz zurecht die Kanzlerfähigkeit ab. Hut ab vor dieser Rede!

Have you ever thought about the system of a "Button"? A button is an experience. And there is so much attached to it. Let me explain.

We are (still/mostly) working with real people. Users, colleagues, customers. When we want something from them, it helps to understand what they want, so that we can provide these information. This saves time and helps us to understand the system better.

Automating processes as they are can sometimes be like putting lipstick on a pig. Just because you automate it, doesn't make the process better. Maybe start by looking at what you need to automate, before jumping straight into coding.

The adventure continues. After a week of practicing some things, we are now defining a key situation and start applying different lenses. This post includes some colorful circles, bad drawings and an empathy map. I took the freedom to bundle 4 days.

Quality Eats Process for Breakfast. That was the title of a workshop I gave 8 years ago. The message I tried to convey still stands. It's hard to define processes which result in consistent products. Wood working, baking, coffee. But especially in IT.

One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple. So far I was not successful. But I keep trying.

Day 5 of the Systems Seeing Adventure. Today's task was to look at a picture and note what we see. The system and the interactions. How is it communicated and conveyed.

What comes after „Clusterfuck“?! Asking for a friend.

I was asking myself last year, why am I trying to get things done as quickly as possible? And it boils down to enjoying the accomplishment more than the journey of reaching it.

Day 4 of the Systems Seeing Adventure. This time it's about watching a TED talk from Dr. Russ Ackoff. The talk is absolutely brilliant. And the task was about sketchnoting and some analysis. Warning: no sketchnoting happened. Not my forte.

This is day 3 of the system seeing adventure. It's about exploring system concepts. As I'm quite biased on this topic, I explain the concepts that I'm following at the moment, which are helpful to me as of now.

Testing is never done. So we need to find ways to determine, what is "enough".

Day 2 of the system seeing challenge set by Ruth Malan here https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ruth-malan-4558153_system-seeing-journal-starter-kit-2025-edition-activity-7282070530961141761-xDk7

Enjoying complexity Many years ago I learned the basics about the Cynefin Framework. The very basics. To repeat these very basics, Cynefin differentiates events into five different domains. Simple or obvious, Complicated, Complex, Chaos and Unknown or disorder. This helps to understand how to…

I built me a scraper plane. Based on plans from an Aussie woodworker. The plane is made from pieces of hornbeam, ash tree and apple tree. The blade is from an old Anant jointer plane.

Systems Seeing Adventure – Day 1: Draw a Bike My friend Vernon made me aware of this post from Ruth Malan. It's about a 31 day systems seeing adventure. This is fully up my alley at the moment. So I'll take you with me on this journey. Next step: Draw a bubble diagram of a bike. This task is for…

In my first test conference talk I spoke about a model to help understand how knowledge grows. It's 2D, and despite the complexity of the world, I think it still works brilliantly. So here I give you the rain drop model.

Erzeugt ein Solarschiff wirklich genauso viel Strom wie 100 Kohleschiffe, wie die internationale Energieagentur sagte? Nein! Das Verhältnis ist sogar noch um einiges besser, schreibt @graslutscher.de. www.volksverpetzer.de/faktencheck/...

If you focus on now, you will tomorrow have a better yesterday. But, if you are aware of yesterday and already think about tomorrow (or next year), you might also make better decisions today.

Let's start the new year with a rant. Models of ways of working in Agile look all so smooth and clean. Reality looks a bit different.

Let's start the week with a rant. I don't even know where I wanted to go with this blog post. But things needed to come out. Maybe I will write more on the topic soon, when more structure evolves. It's not simple.

If something is simple, it comes with boundaries. The complexity is in the boundaries. Providing less boundaries might look simpler, but it is actually more complex to use and vice versa.

I don't have a new year's resolution. I want to be better today than I was yesterday. I want to improve one tiny step at a time. Learn from failure AND success. This year is not gonna be THE year. But today is another day. So use it. Have a healthy 2025!

Climate Change is real - don"t ask a polititians, ask an insurance company: Munich Re’s Climate Risk Preparedness Survey 2023/24 #climateChange #climateRisk #climateCrisis #MunichRe #preparedness

This is my last post before the year-end break. I will be back in the new year. Projects and products need certain fundamental rules and processes. It's like building a house on sand. It can work if it's only a small wooden hut.

Assumptions are quickly made. Especially when you put the "rest of the system" into a nice "context" box.

The more complex a system is, the closer it operates at the brink of failure. And in probably all cases its humans that cause systems to fail. This blog is a big rant. Or actually many small rants. If you don't want to get in a bad mood, don't read it.

To be or not to be. That is the question. Describing what something is, is obvious. What it is not, is not that obvious. Yet often it can be helpful to describe what it is not, to emphasize what it actually is.

For some a relation might be only a line or an arrow between two nodes. The relation is its own thing and should be treated as such. It can help a lot in many situations. Not only in testing.

This is my 8th blog post this year, and that within 8 working days. I want to give you a short explanation, why I'm writing so explicitly about topics around systems thinking.

Web of Causation and why I don’t like 5 Whys Before we start, I have to add, that I don't like 5 Whys how I have seen it often done. This is my personal, not very exhaustive experience. Maybe your experience is different. In that case, please take a moment and think about what you do differently…

Taking different perspectives is important to understand complex or chaotic situations better. Different perspectives help to complete the picture of the model to understand it better.

Testing techniques, methods and approaches represent perspectives in systems thinking.

The perspective taken in a system, can drastically change the model itself. But it can also help explaining a system to others in a more effective way.

Sometimes models are too complex to share with a wider audience. Simplifying the model doesn't make the underlying system less complex though. It lowers the bar for engagement.

I love a good complex system. Only just recently I learned about this connection between simple and complex, that made so much sense in hindsight for me. And I will practice to use this from now on more often.

Testing is a lot about zooming in and zooming out. When zooming out leaves the product borders, it's about more than just testing.