Jan Bosch
Few topics are as hotly debated in companies as the question of how to organize people into teams and departments. All kinds of arguments are thrown around, ranging from span of control for managers to optimal professional and personal development for frontline people. Of course, not all of these discussions are genuine and only focused … Read more
One of the worst misconceptions in software engineering is the assumption that if we build software based on a requirement specification, test it according to the spec and deliver it to our customers, we’ve delivered value to these customers. This may be the case when a small team of consultants develops software for a single, … Read more
One of the topics many people fail to understand is the intimate relationship between business strategy and system and software architecture. This is the case for folks on the business side as well as many engineers. To illustrate this, one company I work with is involved in standardization in the context of home automation. It … Read more
In Swedish, there’s a saying that claims that there’s a fundamental difference between giving up and moving on. Giving up is to simply stop the fight even if it’s still worthwhile to continue to pursue a difficult goal. Moving on is concerned with realizing that the goal you’re pursuing is no longer relevant. The world … Read more
The last weeks, I traveled quite a bit (even ran a marathon!) and visited several of companies as well as talked to a lot of people in both industry and academia. Having had a few days to reflect on my experiences, I can’t shake an overall feeling that many are giving up on some of … Read more
One of the hardest things for us as human beings is to adequately balance focus on our own goals and drivers and the needs, requests and influences of others. We all know people who sail their own course no matter what others ask of them and we know people who are so responsive to others … Read more
One of my main pet peeves with Agile is that it, at heart, is a reactive paradigm. The mindset is that we’re in a “steady as she goes” state, there’s some event external to us and we react to it in an agile fashion. In many companies where the business side and the engineering side … Read more
The first blog post in this series discussed the challenges that people are experiencing when working with the agile paradigm. In general, there are three main areas that Agile considers out of scope and that, in my view, need to be included in the succeeding paradigm. These areas are product management, systems engineering and scaling, … Read more
In recent months, I’ve started a series of online and in-person workshops around Agile. These workshops have focused on the challenges of Agile, the things in Agile we want to keep, the things we want to remove as well as practices that we seek to add. Here, I intend to discuss the key elements of … Read more
We started this series with an exploration of the importance of extending our focus from only how to build the systems we’re responsible for to the why and what of these systems. When we only look at the how, we tend to focus on efficiency: cranking out as many features as possible per unit of … Read more
