Jan Bosch
Photo by Kristopher Roller on Unsplash During a recent conversation with a journalist, the downsides of agile came up in the interview. The questions were centered around stress levels of team members, the frustration with not being able to do a proper design before building features, the perceived reduction in innovation and other factors. During … Read more
(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
Another week; another ridiculous amount of hours on an airplane, so this post is coming from Bangalore. During last week, I noticed an interesting pattern that I had seen several times over the last year: many companies and their leaders are not clear on what business they’re actually in, especially as it comes to being … Read more
With artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning on the top of Gartner’s hype cycle, it is easy to assume that computers will program themselves going forward and that we’ve reached the end of software engineering as a discipline. Although one might naively think that we can just feed a lot of data into a … Read more
This week I gave a keynote at the SANER 2018 conference in Campobasso, Italy. After the talk, some journalist from RAI asked me to do an interview with him about the topics above and I realized that although I have opinions about these topics, it’s pretty hard to quickly pull all that together on the … 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
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
Companies spend very large amounts of resources on functionality that is commodity and does not offer any differentiation to the company and its customers. Our research shows that the R&D investment in commodity could be as high as 80-90%. Although the companies that I work with do not dispute the 80-90% numbers and do not … Read more
This week I was in Madrid to present a keynote at a workshop around variability management (VAMOS 2018). It was a fun event and to some extent a trip down memory lane as I was part of the early research community that systematically started to work on software variability management in the early 2000s. We … Read more
