psychological safety

InfoQ Culture & Methods Trends in 2025 Podcast

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This is the 2025 Engineering Culture Trends Report. The InfoQ editorial team and special guest Charity Majors discuss how AI is transforming software development and team performance.

Source: InfoQ Culture & Methods Trends in 2025

InfoQ Culture and Methods Trends Report – 2025

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This report summarizes how the InfoQ Culture and Methods editorial team sees the ongoing and emergent trends in the culture and methods space.

  • AI tools dramatically increase development speed but come with quality concerns, creating a need for new testing and quality approaches.
  • Team collaboration remains essential despite AI advancement; there’s a risk of engineers turning to AI rather than colleagues for solutions, potentially undermining the collaborative culture that drives high performance.
  • Junior engineers remain vital to the industry, with today’s juniors adapting quickly by using AI as a learning accelerator before approaching senior colleagues with more refined questions.
  • Psychological safety continues to be fundamental for high-performing teams, though it’s being challenged by post-pandemic organizational cultures and economic pressures.
  • Observability costs are constantly growing, organizations need to view observability as a strategic investment rather than just a cost center.
  • Agile and DevOps practices have become so integrated into industry standards that they’re now “the air that we breathe,” with platform engineering emerging as the next evolution, bringing product and design mindsets to developer tooling.

In the annual Culture & Methods Trends Report podcast, InfoQ’s Culture & Methods editorial team, with special guest Charity Majors, explored the shifting landscape of software development culture, tools, and practices. The wide-ranging discussion revealed several key trends shaping how software teams are working in 2025, from the profound impact of AI tools on development practices to evolving perspectives on team performance and observability.

Source: InfoQ Culture and Methods Trends Report – 2025

Culture & Methods Trends Report March 2021

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  • COVID-19 was the biggest driver of culture change in the last year
  • There are dramatic differences between good and bad remote work cultures
  • Management practices are evolving to adapt to the new ways of working and the expectations of the workforce
  • Creating real psychological safety and focusing on employee experience is hard, but pays off in terms of engagement, motivation and outcomes
  • Ethical issues, diversity and inclusion and tech for good make a difference and need to be addressed purposefully.

COVID-19 was the largest influence of change in the culture and methods space in 2020 and the knock on effects in 2021 are driving many of the trends we see at this time.  The previous trends report was released early in the pandemic and we now have a year’s worth of content to explore how the IT world has adapted and responded. There have been many examples of great collaboration, teamwork and adapting to new ways of working along with plenty of stories of hardship, Zoom Fatigue, mental and physical health challenges and other impacts as people have adapted to working from home, managers have changed long-held beliefs about remote work and organisations have adopted new technologies to support the shift.

Source: Culture & Methods Trends Report March 2021