Data-Driven Development: Step 1 – Model Feature Value

In my research and consulting engagements with companies, one of the recurring themes is the ambition of companies to become more data-driven in their way of working. After working on this topic with a variety of companies, my fellow researchers and I defined an adoption process that companies go through when adopting data-driven development practices. … Read more

DevOps is NOT about DevOps

This week we held the reporting workshop for sprint 15 of Software Center. The event was, with 150+ participants, the largest and most successful workshop we have had so far and it was great to have it at the fabulous HQ facilities of AB Volvo. Although we had quite a broad set of topics and … Read more

Your Product Is No Longer The Product

Recently, when interviewing (for our research) someone at a company in the food space, I learned something that I hadn’t realized: these days, cheese is a by-product. For thousands of years, farmers milked cows and then, as a way to preserve the milk, they made cheese out of it. And that cheese, or at least … Read more

Become Data-Driven In Five Steps

Although most of the online (SaaS) companies that I work with are heavily data-driven, the embedded systems companies have had more difficulty to achieve that. With connectivity becoming more and more the norm for embedded systems, though, these companies are now also starting to become data driven. This is great as replacing opinion-driven decision making … Read more

What Are You Optimizing For?

Over the last weeks, I have been in several group conversations where we had to agree on the relative priority of multiple factors. For instance, are we optimizing for the total number of users or are we optimizing for maximizing revenue per user? Should we prioritize fuel efficiency or is minimizing exhaust waste more important? … Read more

Stop Customizing Your System! Configure It Instead!

Although mass-market companies have figured this out long ago, companies offering their software-intensive systems to a smaller group of powerful customers are often under significant pressure to customize their systems for individual customers. There are at least three reasons why customizing your system for each individual customer used to be a good idea. First, when … Read more

Engineering Deep Learning Systems is Hard!

(Image credit: pixabay) This week I spent in the lovely city of Prague, attending the SEAA 2018 conference. The main reason for attending was that I had the opportunity to present a paper that I co-authored with colleagues from Peltarion about the software engineering challenges of deep learning. Peltarion offers an amazing platform for building … Read more

Five Reasons Why You Are Not Data-Driven

  (Photo by Arif Wahid on Unsplash) This week I spent a lot of time with companies talking about data and using data for a variety of purposes, ranging from improved decision making to machine learning and deep learning systems. All companies I talk to have tons of data in their archives and often generate … Read more

Towards Dataism

Over the last months, one of the books that I’ve been reading is Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari. It’s a really worthwhile read and I can warmly recommend it. One of the key ideas that he brings up in the last part of the book is the evolution of religions that mankind seems to … Read more