Jan Bosch
There are few topics in software development that can get people going as much as testing and quality assurance. The notion of shipping low-quality code to customers feels like a humiliation to most engineers. It causes a perception of abusing the customer for testing purposes, which doesn’t sit right and to many feels like a … Read more
In the early 2000s, I was one of those people preaching the importance of careful design and analysis of a system’s architecture before starting development. The belief was that especially non-functional requirements, such as performance and robustness, are hard to ‘bolt on’ to the system once development is underway. So, the software architecture community, including … Read more
Building software-intensive systems from scratch is far from trivial. One of the main reasons is that it’s hard to capture concisely and precisely what the system should look like in terms of functionality. Even if all stakeholders individually have a clear understanding of what they want, it doesn’t mean that the expectations are aligned. In … Read more
Traditional business ecosystems were quite static. Partners stayed partners, competitors stayed competitors and your customers were the same as who they were yesterday. In a digital world, however, business ecosystems are in continuous flux. Your supplier becomes your competitor. You become your customer’s competitor. You partner with companies that you never heard of a month … Read more
For the longest time in the history of humankind, we lived in a world defined by scarcity. Forests for hunting, land for agriculture, wood for construction and mining sites – all were scarce resources that many wanted to have, and consequently, we competed. Individuals competed against individuals. Tribes competed against tribes. Nation-states competed against other … Read more
Little known fact: the original schools, started in the 19th century, had the goal of training obedient factory workers. The whole notion of sitting still at a desk, taking instructions and following orders was quite alien to many who had grown up on farms. For the factory owners to have access to workers, it was … Read more
The traditional way of organizing companies was in functional departments where people with the same skillset and education could focus on specific challenges, solve these and then hand over the result to the department that would integrate all the parts from all the functions into one working system. The perceived advantage was that each expert … Read more
When I was a teenager, I thought the pinnacle of professional success was being responsible for hundreds of people in an organization. My dad was a regional manager in a big supermarket chain in the Netherlands and had thousands of people working in his area of responsibility and my view of success might have been … Read more
One of the interesting facts uncovered by psychology is that people suffer three times as much from losing something they had as they enjoy getting something they didn’t have before. There are all kinds of convincing explanations coming out of evolutionary biology why this would be the case, but in the modern world, it easily … Read more
Do you work above or below the API? Recently, I was introduced to the concept by a newsletter of Mark Manson where he talked about people being left behind because they get stuck in a rut and fail to reinvent themselves. The idea is that when you work below the API, you’re basically working for … Read more
