Jan Bosch
As companies seek to adopt continuous practices, one of the claims I run into a lot is that customers don’t want DevOps. This argument is often used as a way to cut off the discussion as we obviously shouldn’t do what customers don’t want. Instead, we should keep things as they are as customers are … 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
The baseball player, Yogi Berra, famously said “Prediction is hard. Especially about the future.” That is of course entirely correct. Who of us predicted the COVID pandemic or the way the stock market tanked in 2022? Of course, there are always doomsayers who continuously predict these things, but they are right in the way a … Read more
One of the models that I use frequently in my consulting assignments is the 10 types of innovation model by Doblin/Monitor Group. As the name suggests, the model identifies 10 different forms of innovation arranged around the business ecosystem, the offering and the customer experience. This model is important as most people think about improving … Read more
The traditional way of software development is to first agree on what to build, then build the functionality and finally commence testing and fixing defects until the quality is at an acceptable level. As anyone who has spent any time in this field knows, no software is ever flawless, but the concept is to get … Read more
Every company I meet claims that they’re agile. When I push a little bit and ask for details, typically the conclusion is that this is only true at the team level. The rest of the organization is stuck in traditional, slow cycles. The defense that I get is that the company is fast enough in … Read more
Traditional thinking is that platforms are about efficiency through reuse. Product teams get a bunch of functionality for free from the platform and only have to build the remaining product-specific functionality. The interesting thing about software reuse is that it’s been extremely successful at the inter-company level. The amount of software that’s being reused through … Read more
Many entrepreneurs are looking to maintain as much ownership of the company as possible over time. To pay the bills and have some revenue come in, one strategy is to engage in consulting assignments. Of course, some founders are able to go without salary for an extended period of time, but in practice, they often … 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
Soon after the introduction of agility in software development, the notion of business agility was introduced as well. The basic idea was to scale the concepts behind agile software development to larger scopes, with the ambition to reach the entire organization, including R&D and IT. In practice, however, for many organizations, it proved difficult to … Read more
