Why Governance Matters

QCon London 2026

Slides available on SpeakerDeck.

References

Books and Research Reports

Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps (Forsgren, Humble, Kim, 2018)

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/accelerate/9781457191435/

Research showing CABs don’t improve stability.

Regulatory and Industry Reports

FCA: Implementing Technology Change — multi-firm review of CABs in financial services

https://www.fca.org.uk/publications/multi-firm-reviews/implementing-technology-change

Statistics on CAB effectiveness.

Cortex 2026 Engineering in the Age of AI report

https://www.cortex.io/report/engineering-in-the-age-of-ai-2026-benchmark-report

AI tool adoption and governance statistics.

Jellyfish 2025 State of Engineering Management report

https://jellyfish.co/resources/2025-state-of-engineering-management-report/

Earlier data on AI tool adoption (61% to 90%).

Sonar 2026 State of Code Developer Survey

https://www.sonarsource.com/the-state-of-code/developer-survey-report/

42% of committed code is AI-generated; 96% don’t trust AI code.

Pragmatic Engineer 2026 AI Tooling deep dive

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-tooling-2026

95% using AI tools weekly; 70% using 2–4 tools.

Veracode GenAI Code Security Report (October 2025 update)

https://www.veracode.com/resources/analyst-reports/2025-genai-code-security-report/

45% of LLM tasks introduced security flaws.

2025 Harness State of Software Engineering Excellence Report

https://www.harness.io/the-state-of-software-engineering-excellence

Only 11% of orgs generate SBOMs for all artefacts.

DORA State of DevOps research (Google Cloud)

https://dora.dev/research/

DORA capabilities.

EU Cyber Resilience Act (Regulation 2024/2847)

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/cyber-resilience-act

SBOM mandate for products sold in EU markets. Reporting from Sept 2026; full enforcement Dec 2027.

Linux Foundation / OpenSSF data on open source in modern applications (70–90%)

https://openssf.org/

Referenced for the claim that most modern software is code you didn’t write.

Supply Chain Attack Coverage

Socket.dev: Ongoing supply chain attack targets CrowdStrike npm packages

https://socket.dev/blog/ongoing-supply-chain-attack-targets-crowdstrike-npm-packages

CISA alert: Widespread supply chain compromise impacting npm ecosystem

https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/alerts/2025/09/23/widespread-supply-chain-compromise-impacting-npm-ecosystem

Aikido: npm debug and chalk packages compromised

https://www.aikido.dev/blog/npm-debug-and-chalk-packages-compromised

AI and Cybersecurity Statistics

CRN Asia: AI cuts cyberattack breakout time (CrowdStrike report)

https://www.crnasia.com/news/2026/cybersecurity/ai-cuts-cyberattack-breakout-time-to-29-minutes-reveals-crowdstrike-report

27-second fastest breakout time.

Coretelligent: Anthropic disrupts GTG-1002 cyber espionage

https://www.coretelligent.com/resources/intelligence-report/december-2025-anthropic-disrupts-gtg-1002-cyber-espionage/

AI-driven cyberattack campaign.

The Network Installers: AI cyber threat statistics

https://thenetworkinstallers.com/blog/ai-cyber-threat-statistics/

87% of orgs targeted by AI-powered attacks.

Software Supply Chain Security Tools

Sigstore / Cosign — signing and verifying container images

https://docs.sigstore.dev/about/overview/

CycloneDX — SBOM standard and tooling

https://cyclonedx.org

SLSA (Supply Chain Levels for Software Artefacts)

https://slsa.dev/

OpenSSF Scorecard — automated security checks for GitHub repos

https://github.com/ossf/scorecard

Semver ranges explained (npm)

https://semver.npmjs.com

AI Code Security

Aikido: Slopsquatting — AI package hallucination attacks

https://www.aikido.dev/blog/slopsquatting-ai-package-hallucination-attacks

AI hallucinating package names that attackers register.

Engineering Culture and Practices

Dan McKinley: Choose Boring Technology

https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology

Henrik Kniberg: Agile intro slides (alignment vs autonomy)

https://blog.crisp.se/2023/09/20/henrikkniberg/agile-intro-slides-from-my-kth-talk

Henrik Kniberg: Alignment at Scale (keynote PDF)

https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Agile-Africa-keynote-Alignment-at-Scale.pdf

Zalando open source technology radar

https://opensource.zalando.com/tech-radar

Andrea Laforgia: Shifting trust from human inspection to systemic verification (LinkedIn)

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andrealaforgia_ai-artificialintelligence-softwaredevelopment-activity-7425517167242178560-NuZV

Financial Times-Specific References

The Advent of Change API (FT Product & Technology blog)

https://medium.com/ft-product-technology/the-advent-of-change-api-8dae0f95245e

Sarah Wells: Productivity at the FT (InfoQ presentation)

https://infoq.com/presentations/productivity-ft