Michele Brissoni
Behavioral engineering for software teams in the AI era | Inventor Software Craftsmanship Dojo® | Co-creator nWave the open source AI SW Factory
Bratislava, Slovakia
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In February 2020, at IBM Studios in Milan, Mike Brissoni opened Agile Venture Milano beside Cesare Baroni, Vice President IT Delivery in IBM's CIO organization. Between them they were describing engineering practice across 170 countries and 360,000 employees, and the question underneath that talk is the one he still works on: what actually makes a large engineering organization move.
He has come at it from two sides for most of his life. On the tatami, 45+ years of practice and 35+ years teaching, six black belts, and the unhurried business of turning a beginner into someone others can learn from. In software, 25+ years of test-driven development, 20+ years of research and development behind the Software Craftsmanship Dojo®, and 15+ years applying it inside teams who had to change while they kept shipping.
The standard he measures against comes from a pit lane. Ferrari in the Schumacher years, where a group of people under absurd time pressure made precision look like an ordinary Sunday, is still the picture in his head when he watches a delivery team at work.
His current work sits where AI meets that same question.
He co-created nWave, an open-source engineering framework released under MIT in February 2026 and now carried by contributors well beyond the two people who started it; Dave Farley opened his AI Briefings series with it in April 2026.
Through The Forge of Unicorns, his research program, he has interviewed 130+ people, analyzed 52 unicorns and studied 100+ investment portfolios, tracing why capital and engineering talent so rarely arrive in the same place.
He advises engineering leadership as a fractional CTO/CAIO.
Selected speaking: opening keynote, Agile Venture Milano at IBM Studios, Milan, 2020; peer-reviewed experience report, XP 2024, Agile Alliance, Bozen-Bolzano; lightning talk, IT Revolution Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit Europe, hosted by Gene Kim, 2024; Italian Agile Days, Milan 2023 and Florence 2024; Agile Venture Vimercate, 2019; Software Crafts Romandie, Lausanne, 2026; AI Agents Montreal, 2026.
Recommended as a speaker by Gergely Orosz in The Pragmatic Engineer.
He is Italian, born in the Dolomites, based in Slovakia, and works with distributed teams worldwide.
Area of Expertise
Topics
You Are Already a Software Company. AI Made Sure of It.
Blockbuster turned down the software that turned DVDs into on demand. Volkswagen spent
billions building its own software, then trashed it and bought from others. One company
did not see the change coming, the other saw it and could not hold it; different
instinct, same root, a misjudgment of what software engineering actually is.
Every company now produces software, and most cannot say how much, or who wrote it.
Call it the AI dark factory, call it AI shadow IT; the label does not matter, because
the invoice is identical, expensive and carrying regulatory risk. AI did not create
that. AI turned the lights on, and now the room is too bright to look away from.
This session follows the money. Where it actually leaves an engineering organization,
why a board dashboard stays green while the delivery floor tells a different story, and
what an engineering leader can do about it on Monday morning.
Takeaways:
- How to size the software your organization already produces, including the part
nobody logged.
- Where AI spend converts into delivered capability, and where it does not.
- A way to read the distance between the board's picture and the field's picture,
without anyone having to be wrong.
nWave, Live: Building With Agents in Front of You
nWave is an open source engineering framework, MIT licensed, co-created with Alessandro
Di Gioia and released in February 2026. This session is not slides about it. It is the
framework driven live, on a real problem, with the agent behavior visible on screen and
the rough edges left in rather than edited out.
Delivered live at the AI Agents Montreal meetup, March 2026, taking a legacy React
codebase and adding a feature with nWave driving. And at Software Crafts Romandie in
Lausanne, on spec-driven AI coding.
Montreal: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Zdobci6tWeM
Lausanne: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2HfhJ0d5uv0
In the Heart 🩺 of the DOJO🇯🇵 14 Years of SW Craftsmanship With 15,000 Elite Developers
A dojo is not a classroom. It is a floor where people practice under observation, get
corrected in the moment, and come back the next week to do it again, and it works for
engineers for the same reason it has always worked for martial artists.
This session opens the method: how a curriculum is designed backwards from a behavior
rather than forwards from a syllabus, what gets measured, what is deliberately left
unmeasured, and where behavioral engineering repays the effort against where it is
slow and expensive.
Presented as a peer-reviewed experience report at XP 2024, Agile Alliance,
Bozen-Bolzano, and as a lightning talk at the IT Revolution Enterprise Technology
Leadership Summit Europe, hosted by Gene Kim.
ETLS 2024: https://videos.itrevolution.com/watch/941947632/
XP 2024: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eX4UhgZByHM
Whitepaper: https://www.agilealliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Michele-Brissoni-Behavioral-Engineering-at-the-Software-Craftsmanship-Dojo-A-14-year-Adventure-Empowering-Over-15000-Developers.pdf
Stop Transforming, Start Evolving
A transformation program has a start date, a budget and an end date, and the behavior it
set in motion often needs the funding to stay in motion. Evolution has a different shape:
small changes in what people do daily, measured while they are happening rather than a
quarter after.
This session covers behavioral engineering applied to organizational change. Why outcome
metrics and OKRs report the past, how Key Behavior Indicators, now close to 200 of them,
give a leading signal on the practices that actually move delivery, and how BOKaRy, a
behavioral OKR structure, connects the two so a board and a delivery floor are looking at
the same reality.
Delivered at Italian Agile Days 2024, Florence:
https://vimeo.com/1030487816
Building a Culture of SW Craftsmanship
Internal developer platforms were meant to make quality a property of the paved road.
They did a great deal of good, and they did not make the code better on their own. In
2026 the same story is repeating with coding agents: the throughput arrives, the
judgment does not arrive with it.
This session describes what a dojo does that a platform cannot. Deliberate practice, a
curriculum built on behavior rather than tooling, and feedback that reaches a person
the same week rather than at the next performance review. It draws on 20+ years of
research and development behind the Software Craftsmanship Dojo® and 15+ years applying
it inside teams who kept delivering throughout.
For engineering leaders who already bought the platform and the assistants, and want
the last mile.
Delivered at Italian Agile Days 2023, Milan:
https://vimeo.com/903907381.
DevOps adoption through behavioral change.
Continuous delivery without continuous integration, and end-to-end test automation
standing in for test-driven development: the patterns that stall a DevOps adoption are
rarely tooling patterns. They are patterns of behavior, and they were visible long before
AI joined the pipeline.
This session traces DevOps back to its roots in Extreme Programming, shows where an
adoption typically loses momentum, and covers what changes when the practice is designed
around behavior rather than around the toolchain.
Delivered at Agile Venture Vimercate, 2019: https://vimeo.com/346399210
Italian Agile Days 2024 Sessionize Event
Italian Agile Days 2023 Sessionize Event
Michele Brissoni
Behavioral engineering for software teams in the AI era | Inventor Software Craftsmanship Dojo® | Co-creator nWave the open source AI SW Factory
Bratislava, Slovakia
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