Jan Bosch
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
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
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
This week, I attended the International Conference on Software Business (ICSOB 2020) and gave a presentation on autonomously improving systems. The core idea is that software-intensive systems can measure their performance, know what to optimize for and can autonomously experiment with their own behavior. The history of software-intensive systems can be divided into three main … Read more
For all the human suffering and economic impact caused by corona, there’s one thing that has just surprised me over and over again these last weeks: companies and professionals just adjust and adjust quickly. Teams and departments that were stuck in old ways of working suddenly have found that it’s entirely possible to work in … Read more
With the vast majority of white-collar staff in companies currently working from home, the normal ways of managing people are disrupted quite fundamentally. Working closely with people in such a way that you can tell them what to do is much more difficult when you’re not physically in the same place. Similarly, many organizations rely … Read more
One of the well-known struggles of every company I work with is to combine innovation with efficiency-oriented operations. This is the classic problem of ambidexterity: the company needs to deliver on today’s revenue and margins while securing its future. The problem is not that companies aren’t aware of the challenge but that they lack the … Read more
As part of the research in Software Center, I work with dozens of companies in the software-intensive embedded systems space on a variety of topics. One of these topics is the development of new products. Having worked with online companies, as well as startups, I’ve become indoctrinated with Steve Blank’s ideas and the “lean startup” … Read more
This week, for the umpteenth time, I met a team in the process of putting a new product in the market, telling me that they were so customer centric. What they meant was that during development, they’d talked to a number of potential customers and some of the employees had used prototypes. For those that … Read more
