Jan Bosch
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
The time has come to eradicate requirements as a mechanism for communicating between different groups inside and between organizations. Although requirements have been used as the key mechanism to describe the functionality desired from the system since the beginning of software engineering as a field, over recent years the limitations have become increasingly clear to … Read more
This week I spent a few days at the OOP 2017 conference in Munich, Germany. Before, during and after my talk there (click here for the slides) the topic of innovation came up frequently. It seems like every company has its own garage, lab and open innovation initiative. They all have read the Lean Startup … Read more
As Marc Andreessen so eloquently wrote in his Wall street Journal OpEd, software is eating the world. In virtually every industry, ranging from banking to retail and from mobile phones to self-driving cars, the companies that are winning are the ones who are best at software. Many, however, wonder what it means to be best, … Read more
Introduction to Data The ability to continuously deploy new versions of software to some or all customers leads to another major evolution concerning the radically changed ability of companies to measure how users are using the software. Although software companies have often used technique to collect usage and quality data, continuous, deployment demands continuous connectivity … Read more
