Jan Bosch
Some decades after the term “Agile” was introduced in software development, one would expect that – assuming it was a good idea (which it is) – the concept should have been fully embedded in industry and we’re busy with other things. Still, and this never fails to surprise me, everyone is talking about “beyond Agile.” … Read more
DevOps, DataOps, MLOps – the number of different “Ops” combinations seems to have exploded over the last year or so. There are manifestos, meetups, lots of blog posts and research articles about these various approaches. In order to get clear on terminology, I think it’s good to define what we’re talking about. So, first, DevOps … Read more
Recently, I got an e-mail asking me why we should care about Agile if the overall product development process, including mechanics and electronics, is measured in years and is completely waterfall. The question took me by surprise. I’ve been working with Agile practices for the better part of two decades now and for me, it’s … Read more
This week I spent time at several conferences and I noticed something surprising: Almost 20 years after the publication of the Agile Manifesto, there are STILL people talking about their agile transformation and consultant companies talking about the challenges of adopting agile practices. What in heaven’s name is going on here? Let’s be clear here: … Read more
We live in a world that is driven by a Need for Speed and when leaders mention agility, continuous integration and continuous deployment, often speed is mentioned as the key driver. Having worked with dozens of companies, my learning is that companies go through a number of evolution steps in order to work with speed. … Read more
In the posts from the last weeks, I discussed the first two steps in adopting data-driven development (see figure below), i.e. modeling feature value and building the necessary infrastructure. Once we have described the value that we expect from a feature and have constructed the infrastructure required to capture the data coming back from the … Read more
This week we held the reporting workshop for sprint 15 of Software Center. The event was, with 150+ participants, the largest and most successful workshop we have had so far and it was great to have it at the fabulous HQ facilities of AB Volvo. Although we had quite a broad set of topics and … Read more
During the last weeks, I reflected on the difference between the startups and the large, established companies that I work with. One of the main differences seems to be the amount of freedom that individuals have. When a company is first formed and the initial team is assembled, there is of course the normal “storming, … Read more
Since the summer, I have worked with several companies that are starting to see continuous deployment on their horizon. This is great progress and brings many advantages such as fast feedback on quality issues in the field as well as the ability to quickly fix any issues that customers experience. Internally, more frequent deployment often … Read more
This week we hosted the 22nd International System and Software Product Line Conference in Gothenburg and I had the honor of being the general chair for the conference. Software product line research is concerned with the challenges associated with building a family of products from a shared platform. These challenges include managing variants, balancing platform … Read more
