As we bid farewell to 2024 and welcome 2025, it’s a perfect moment to reflect on the lessons this year has offered—both rewarding and challenging—and to prepare for the opportunities ahead. This year marked a significant milestone as I celebrated 20 years in the industry. Along this journey, I shared my experiences by publishing a book, contributing over 30 articles and whitepapers on topics like the AI-powered metaverse, IoT, D&Iand product management.

AI is transforming the software development process, but there are many misconceptions about its capabilities. This article explores the common myths surrounding AI in software development and sheds light on its reality. In recent times, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has gained momentum across various fields, especially with the introduction of Generative AI (GenAI). AI is now widely accessible, often sparking discussions about its potential, its misuse, and, unfortunately, several myths. As the hype around AI intensifies, so does the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), leading many to adopt it without fully understanding its true value.

📕 Exploring the Metaverse Redefining Reality in the Digital Age “Exploring the Metaverse” is a comprehensive guide to the metaverse, the future state of the internet. Prepare yourself for what’s ahead by understanding the opportunities and challenges of the metaverse. This book calls us to action, emphasizing that its evolution is in our hands. You can find a detailed synopsis of the book here. Available globally on Amazon and BPB Online as both paperback and eBook.

As we say goodbye to 2023 and welcome 2024, it’s a time to think about the good and tough parts of the year. Not everything goes the way we want, but we can learn from both the good and bad experiences. I see 2023 as a year of making things better, like fixing the base of a building. I’ve picked my top five observations on foundational changes from this year, and some might continue into 2024.

Agility Today is a 2 days annual UnConference, to meet Agility needs of industry, gathered over past few years via meetups, Conferences and Webinar. This UnConference intends to give you best of Agile Psyche (Mindset Culture and Practice) and Geekery (Engineering, Tools and DevOps). This year in Agility Today Fest 2023 there are couple of programs. I am speaking to at Agile Engineering Lab (Technical Agility & Engineering Excellence), on topic of Scaling content generation for XR using AI.

Every end is a beginning, if there is no end, then there is no beginning, just like the year 2023 can only start after the end of year 2022. So this is the right time to reflect and plan for a better beginning. A “Forward Looking Reflection” was my topic of a guest lecture at DesignersX at their year end event. We discussed challenges of software development, and how the industry is trying to solve them.

Enterprise XR is gaining good traction, and software development’s best practices like Agile principles really matters due to multitude of tooling and tech stacks used for Enterprise XR solutions Enterprises do face multiple challenges with the XR development lifecycle. One of them is the automation of testing XR applications. In response to this gap, ThoughtWorks has developed Arium – an open-source, lightweight, extensible, platform-agnostic framework that helps write automation tests that are built specifically for XR Applications.

Covid19 has challenged the way we eat, the way we commute, the way we socialize, and the way we work. In short, it impacted the way we live. More than a million people got infected and the number is growing exponentially, it has impacted the whole world. We need to find new ways of life and change our focus and priorities to save nature and humanity. Technology can play a great role in coping with it.

IT Modernization is one of the key factors of today’s digital transformation. Most of the enterprises trying to define digital transformation strategy. IT organizations trying to redesign the organizations to meet the changing business need, and uplift the technology and people. Non-IT organizations are also trying to setup digital department to take care of companies digital assets and modernize them. However, IT modernization does not always result in a profit, it may lead to revenue loss if it does not fit to the organization design.

The book “Agile IT Organization Design - For digital transformation and continuous delivery” by Sriram Narayan explains software development as a design process. Following statement from the book means a lot. “Software development is a design process, and the production environment is the factory where product takes place. IT OPS work to keep the factory running..” It questions the way we traditionally think of operation support, maintenance, production bugs, rework, their costs and budgets and the focus in software development life.

Agile software development methodology is the key selling point for most of the IT organisations, however many of the organisations have gone by the literal meaning of the word “Agile”. They follow agile practices without really being agile. If we go by Manifesto for Agile Software Development, it focus more on human factor (people, interaction, collaboration) which produces working software as per the need of time, than on processes, tools and strict planning.