Jan Bosch
Jan Bosch A long time ago, I had a discussion with a software architect working for a consumer electronics company. We talked about development efficiency and he explained to me the economics of high-volume manufacturing. When you manufacture a million televisions and you can squeeze one euro out of the bill-of-materials cost, you’ve made the company a … Read more
In the software community, there’s a general belief that software ages, just like humans – David Parnas is famous for this quote (among many other things). Our findings don’t confirm this. We’ve studied architecture technical debt as well as other types of technical debt for a decade and we’ve generated all kinds of results. One … Read more
There are few topics in software development that can get people going as much as testing and quality assurance. The notion of shipping low-quality code to customers feels like a humiliation to most engineers. It causes a perception of abusing the customer for testing purposes, which doesn’t sit right and to many feels like a … Read more
In the early 2000s, I was one of those people preaching the importance of careful design and analysis of a system’s architecture before starting development. The belief was that especially non-functional requirements, such as performance and robustness, are hard to ‘bolt on’ to the system once development is underway. So, the software architecture community, including … Read more
Building software-intensive systems from scratch is far from trivial. One of the main reasons is that it’s hard to capture concisely and precisely what the system should look like in terms of functionality. Even if all stakeholders individually have a clear understanding of what they want, it doesn’t mean that the expectations are aligned. In … Read more
The world of software remains a fascinating place and I keep being amazed at how rapidly it continues to evolve and transform. We certainly have come a long from the early 1980s when I was a teenager programming BASIC on my ZX81. Especially for those of us who have been in the field for decades, … Read more
Traditional business ecosystems were quite static. Partners stayed partners, competitors stayed competitors and your customers were the same as who they were yesterday. In a digital world, however, business ecosystems are in continuous flux. Your supplier becomes your competitor. You become your customer’s competitor. You partner with companies that you never heard of a month … Read more
For the longest time in the history of humankind, we lived in a world defined by scarcity. Forests for hunting, land for agriculture, wood for construction and mining sites – all were scarce resources that many wanted to have, and consequently, we competed. Individuals competed against individuals. Tribes competed against tribes. Nation-states competed against other … Read more
Little known fact: the original schools, started in the 19th century, had the goal of training obedient factory workers. The whole notion of sitting still at a desk, taking instructions and following orders was quite alien to many who had grown up on farms. For the factory owners to have access to workers, it was … Read more
The traditional way of organizing companies was in functional departments where people with the same skillset and education could focus on specific challenges, solve these and then hand over the result to the department that would integrate all the parts from all the functions into one working system. The perceived advantage was that each expert … Read more
