Jan Bosch
(image credit: pixabay) This week was about travel and keynote presentations. Although the traveling can be a bit of a drag, I love meeting people and hear them sell their stories after they have listened to my talk. The interesting thing is to hear that many people talk about the product that they are contributing … Read more
A few weeks ago, I posted a blog post with the same title as this post. This week, we hosted the International Conference on Software Engineering in Gothenburg. It was a great event with 1800 participants. As part of the conference, the Wednesday was allocated to an Industry Forum and as part of that, I … Read more
This week, I came across a concept from Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, where he distinguishes human beings from other creatures in that we can create an idea in the theater of our imagination. We test the idea against other ideas that we have or others have or even against the world. And … Read more
Why Fast Feedback Cycles Matter from Jan Bosch.
When studying software-intensive systems companies, one of the interesting observations is that they all evolve in the same way. In earlier research, we have referred to this as the “Stairway to Heaven”. In the figure below, the speed dimension of the Stairway to Heaven model is shown. This model is a descriptive model based on … Read more
In an earlier blog post, I raised the question of how agile organizations really are. This was based on my experience with a variety of companies that claim to be agile, but that, when taking a closer look, were not agile at all. Or that were using some agile practices, but failed to reap the … Read more
This week I worked with two very different companies on what started out as very different topics, but that ended up at the same place: bad decision making due to the reliance on experience, beliefs, customer insights sometimes decades old, etc. So, the discussion turned towards decision making and how to develop processes where data … Read more
Reflecting on software intensive companies during the summer break made me think about the way investment decisions are made and what new approaches, such as continuous integration and deployment as well as data analytics, mean for these investment decisions. A key principle that I learned while working in Silicon Valley is to minimize investment between … Read more
The vast majority of R&D leaders and especially consultants focus on the efficiency of R&D: how to convert requirements into software against the lowest possible cost and resource needs. Although anyone from agile and scrum experts to continuous integration professionals focus on this challenge, very few people focus on the effectiveness of R&D. Effectiveness refers … Read more
During many of my presentations as well as during meetings with companies, the topic of quality comes up. As I stress the importance of speed, continuous integration and continuous deployment, a general unease settles over the group until someone brings up the topic of ensuring quality. Frequently this is followed by a couple of anecdotes … Read more
