Jan Bosch
Jan Bosch Over thirty years ago, I started my first company. Since then, I’ve started more companies, acted as an angel investor in more than ten ventures and as a board member or advisor in several others, and interacted with numerous founders and entrepreneurs. In addition, I’ve collaborated with intrapreneurs inside large organizations trying to get innovations … Read more
After decades in the industry, I have yet to meet the first company that doesn’t claim they’re customer centric. There remains a widely held belief that if we focus all our energy on the customer and build what the customer tells us to build, we’re going to continue to be successful. Still, the quote from … Read more
Embedded systems, by their definition, contain mechanical and electronic components and, through that, interact with the real world. Many of these systems may cause harm to humans if they act in erroneous ways. This is, of course, the case for aeronautical and automotive applications as well as for medical equipment. But also most systems that … Read more
In the online world of software as a service (SaaS), A/B testing in some form is used continuously for virtually any type of development. For an A/B test, two alternative realizations of a feature or some functionality are developed and presented to a test group (alternative B) and a control group (alternative A). Some outcome … Read more
A few decades ago, the first reports were published on software errors resulting in financial losses exceeding 1 billion euros. Since then, many more accounts of software errors costing hundreds of millions or more have been in the news. The response in the larger community was twofold. First, test the heck out of every piece … Read more
Digitalization is concerned with the three key enabling digital technologies software, data and artificial intelligence. These build on each other as it typically is software that generates the data from systems in the field and it’s this data (preferably labeled) that forms the basis for machine learning and deep learning. The software-intensive systems industry, as … Read more
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
