← The ADLC library
Delivery & program intelligence
A desk of the Fastpace GroundTruth library
What the numbers do when agents arrive.
Measurement under the ADLC: why the four keys drift out of meaning when code production stops being the constraint, what to read instead, and how a transition actually sequences inside an organisation that already has a backlog and a release calendar.
Metrics & DORATransition playbookFailure modes 10 articles
Articles
- Change failure rate is the one to watch Three of the four keys get flattered by agentic development. Change failure rate is the one that can still tell you something is wrong, provided you stop reading it as a rate.
- The confidently wrong pull request It had a clear summary, a passing test suite, and a rationale for every decision. It was also wrong in a way that took eight days and a production incident to find.
- Lead time for changes: the metric agents distort most Lead time was always a measurement of queueing. Agents collapse the part of the queue we measure and leave the part we do not, which makes the number improve while nothing gets faster.
- Pick one team, not the whole org The selection criteria that actually predict whether a pilot survives contact, and why the most enthusiastic team is usually the wrong one to start with.
- Silent scope drift in agent-authored work The ticket was a two-line config change. The merged diff touched nineteen files, and every one of those changes was individually justified. That is what makes it hard to catch.
- Start in shadow mode, proving before writing Run the automation for a full cycle with every write turned off. The fortnight it appears to cost is the cheapest insurance available in this entire transition.
- Deployment frequency when merges outpace decisions The oldest of the four keys was a proxy for removed friction. Under the ADLC it becomes a proxy for something else entirely, and the difference matters more than the number.
- What happens to DORA when you move to the ADLC The four keys still measure something real. They just stop measuring the thing you built them to measure, and the change is quiet enough that most teams miss it for a quarter.
- A ninety-day plan for moving to the ADLC Not a maturity model and not a transformation programme. A week-by-week sequence that starts with measuring the gap and ends with a decision you can defend.
- Speed without a definition of done gets you to the wrong place faster The ticket said "improve the search experience." Nine days and eleven pull requests later, the team had shipped something nobody wanted. Nothing had gone wrong, exactly.
The other desks
Engineering leadershipWhat happens to the people when the code writes itself. Governance, security & complianceThe questions an auditor will ask, before they ask them. Product & acceptance criteriaDone, defined precisely enough that a machine can check it. Platform economics & toolingWhat this actually costs, and what it is worth.