Jan Bosch
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
Photo by Kristopher Roller on Unsplash During a recent conversation with a journalist, the downsides of agile came up in the interview. The questions were centered around stress levels of team members, the frustration with not being able to do a proper design before building features, the perceived reduction in innovation and other factors. During … Read more
The last months, I have started to see an increasing number of articles complaining about agile software development. Many of the articles have a similar tenure. On the one hand, they stress that agile is causing teams to be really stressed and constantly focusing on the next feature to deliver. And on the other hand, … Read more
A few weeks ago, I posted a blog post with the same title as this post. This week, we hosted the International Conference on Software Engineering in Gothenburg. It was a great event with 1800 participants. As part of the conference, the Wednesday was allocated to an Industry Forum and as part of that, I … Read more
Why Fast Feedback Cycles Matter from Jan Bosch.
In an earlier blog post, I raised the question of how agile organizations really are. This was based on my experience with a variety of companies that claim to be agile, but that, when taking a closer look, were not agile at all. Or that were using some agile practices, but failed to reap the … Read more
This week I was in Madrid to present a keynote at a workshop around variability management (VAMOS 2018). It was a fun event and to some extent a trip down memory lane as I was part of the early research community that systematically started to work on software variability management in the early 2000s. We … Read more
One of the discussions that comes up in many of the companies that I work with is the scope of feature teams. Although most companies are still struggling with moving from component teams to feature teams, the increasing prevalence of continuous integration infrastructures makes it easier to move to shared code ownership and teams that … Read more
