Project delivery and risk
Why big projects overrun and what to do about it: tail risk in cost and schedule, reference-class forecasting, and what actually ships versus what gets started.
Research sweeps
2026-09-09 · deep
DORA Metrics in the AI Era
How the DORA four keys (deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, failed deployment recovery time) plus the 2024 rework-rate metric are measured and improved in practice, and how AI-assisted development has shifted them, September 2023 to September 2026: DORA State of DevOps 2023 and 2024, the 2025 State of AI-assisted Software Development and its AI Capabilities Model, the METR developer RCT, GitClear code-churn data, and the SPACE and DevEx frameworks
Claude Fable 5- tech
- academic
- blogs
- +3
2026-07-24 · deep
Software Project Outcomes Over Time, and Is AI Improving Them
Software and IT project outcomes over time from July 2016 to July 2026 (biased to the latest year): baseline success/challenged/failure ranges across trusted longitudinal datasets (Standish CHAOS, Oxford Global Projects and Flyvbjerg, McKinsey, PMI Pulse), the drivers of outcomes (complexity, budget, domain, delivery methodology, sourcing), build-vs-buy and low-code/no-code commissioning choices (OutSystems, Mendix, Power Platform, Retool), and whether AI-assisted development (Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, DORA and METR evidence) is yet improving delivery outcomes on traditional software projects that build ordinary systems rather than AI products.
Claude Fable 5- financial
- frontier
- academic
- +3
2026-07-15 · deep
Enterprise AI Transformation Programmes (2025–2026)
Enterprise AI transformation programmes from July 2025 to July 2026: reported success and failure rates and who measures them, delivery frameworks borrowed from and diverging from classic digital transformation, token cost economics and budgeting under consumption pricing, adoption strategy including leadership over-provisioning of access, and AI governance across AI-Ops, financial business cases, security and regulatory controls as they scale with sector risk tolerance, referencing MIT, McKinsey State of AI, DORA, ThoughtWorks Technology Radar, NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001, and the EU AI Act.
Claude Fable 5- financial
- tech
- academic
- +3
Explainers
- Research Explainer · Vella (2026)
AI helps engineers move faster, but turns more of the job into supervision
Over six months, professional engineers reported spending less time writing code and shifting towards verification. Productivity remained positive, even as flow and other aspects of developer experience deteriorated for a growing minority.
- Research Explainer · Flyvbjerg et al. (2026)
Most IT projects stay near budget, but a small minority run spectacularly over
Across 5,360 IT projects, 59% finished on or below budget. But the severe-overrun group averaged 453% above budget, creating a fat tail: rare outcomes so large that ordinary averages become dangerously reassuring.
- Research Explainer · Demirer, Musolff & Yang (2026)
AI coding agents triple the code developers write, but shipped software barely budges
A study of more than 100,000 GitHub developers finds that each generation of AI coding tool delivers bigger task-level gains, yet those gains shrink dramatically as they travel down the production chain toward actual releases and end users.
- Research Explainer · Liu (2026)
AI coding assistants fix more code smells than they create, but introduce nearly twice the security issues they resolve
Across 304,362 AI-authored commits from 6,275 GitHub repositories, AI tools are a net positive for surface-level code quality but a net negative for bugs and security vulnerabilities, with 24.2% of all introduced issues persisting indefinitely.
- Research Explainer · Zhang et al. (2025)
Agile teams want AI to be a teammate, but the tools, skills, and rules aren't ready yet
A workshop of 30+ researchers and practitioners at XP2025 catalogued six categories of frustration with GenAI in agile software development and co-created a five-theme research roadmap to move from isolated experiments to human-centered integration.