Jan Bosch
Have you ever wondered why car companies don’t run A/B experiments with their customers’ vehicles to improve the fuel efficiency of the engines? It would be perfectly feasible to build engine control software that would, safely, allow for experimentation with a wide variety of parameters to evaluate what settings, in what context and for what … Read more
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
Many of the companies I work with have a continuous discussion concerning organizing teams around the architecture, i.e. component teams, or organizing teams around features. Many factors play into deciding on the preferred model. My general advice is to focus on where the highest degree of complexity and challenge is. If specific components contain highly … Read more
Some years ago, Frederic Laloux published a book called “Reinventing organizations,” which received quite a bit of attention in the media and industry. The basic premise was that organizations don’t need hierarchies, managers and bosses but should instead rely on other mechanisms. Mechanisms such as the advice process, agreements and roles. Others had published works … Read more
As the summer vacation is approaching or has started for most of us, also this blog will take a summer vacation. We will be back in mid August, but I thought I’d share a final post before the summer with five ideas, concepts and reflections that I hope provide you with some food for your … Read more
Few topics are as hotly debated in companies as the question of how to organize people into teams and departments. All kinds of arguments are thrown around, ranging from span of control for managers to optimal professional and personal development for frontline people. Of course, not all of these discussions are genuine and only focused … Read more
There’s a scenario that keeps repeating itself in our collaborations with a variety of companies. We come in and agree to work on a specific data-driven use case. The company claims to have vast amounts of data and nobody in the company worries about not having the data available. That is, until they start looking … Read more
Architecture provides the linchpin between business strategy and technology strategy. Previously, we’ve explored how deep the relationship is between architecture choices and the available business strategy options. As the world is constantly evolving, we need to evolve with it. This means not only adjusting our business strategy to changes but also, by extension, changing the … Read more
When I wrote my first book in the 1990s, it was on software architecture. The central tenet at that time was that we had to be careful and intentional about the initial design of the architecture as subsequent changes were considered to be impossibly difficult. So, as a community, we developed techniques to assess architectures, … Read more
One of the topics many people fail to understand is the intimate relationship between business strategy and system and software architecture. This is the case for folks on the business side as well as many engineers. To illustrate this, one company I work with is involved in standardization in the context of home automation. It … Read more
