Jan Bosch
The coming week, Gothenburg hosts the Internal Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2018) where close to 2000 people come together. That same week also the Lindholmen Software Development Day is organized that brings together around 700 people interested in software, data, digitalization, artificial intelligence and related topics. At these events, there is of course a … Read more
The benefit of spending a lot of time on airplanes is that you get time to think. As I work with quite a few companies and the topic of digitalization comes up on a regular basis, I thought I’d reflect a bit on the role of digitalization and the disruption that it causes in industry. … 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
One of the most interesting patterns that I have observed again and again is that any organization tends to create layer upon layer of bureaucracy over time. Although I can’t find the reference, I remember reading somewhere that any organization increases bureaucracy with 0.7% per year. In my experience, this is a gross underestimation. Often … Read more
Many understand the importance of trust in a society. The ability to park your car somewhere and know it will be there, undamaged when you get back. Booking and paying for a travel ticket or hotel room before arriving and knowing that it will be there. Working for an employer and knowing that there will … Read more
After another week on the road, I am typing these words late Friday evening on a plane home. I spent time with three different companies (who shall remain unnamed) this week and on the way back I was reflecting on the commonalities of what I learned this week. The main lesson was: lots of activity; … Read more
There are few sessions at companies that I run or participate in where there isn’t some form of firefighting that makes it into the discussion. In virtually every company, there are situations where a critical bug is found in the field, the CEO of a customer company escalates to senior management, a critical project is … 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
During the last months, I have run into several situations where folks outside of R&D considered this concept of agile a nice little toy for the propeller-heads in software, rather than something that is in service of the company. In many cases, these people are stuck in a waterfall mindset and feel that it’s perfectly … 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
