Jan Bosch
This week I spent in Buenos Aires (Argentina) at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2017), which is the premier event in the field. As usual, I enjoyed the pre-events such as workshops, smaller co-located conferences and panels more than the main conference itself. Although many will disagree with me, I feel that the … Read more
Software ecosystems and platform businesses are the new black and several of the companies that I work with are, in some form or another, working on more strategic engagements with their ecosystems. Although the ambition to position oneself as a keystone partner in a software ecosystems and to provide a platform for others in the … Read more
Everyone loves order. Order gives structure, predictability, safety and comfort. Our brains are wired to seek order, either by shaping the world around us to maximize it or by avoiding situations where we might lose it. There is nothing more comfortable than sitting smack in the middle of our comfort zone. For the entire history … Read more
During many of my presentations as well as during meetings with companies, the topic of quality comes up. As I stress the importance of speed, continuous integration and continuous deployment, a general unease settles over the group until someone brings up the topic of ensuring quality. Frequently this is followed by a couple of anecdotes … Read more
The time has come to eradicate requirements as a mechanism for communicating between different groups inside and between organizations. Although requirements have been used as the key mechanism to describe the functionality desired from the system since the beginning of software engineering as a field, over recent years the limitations have become increasingly clear to … Read more
Several of the companies that I work with build very complex systems that are hard to break down into largely independent parts. Instead the components in these architectures are internally complex and have elaborate dependencies between them. Although this is an architectural challenge, it also leads to an organizational challenge. Traditional R&D organizations have a … Read more
During the week before Easter, I decided to take some time off work and escape into the Swedish wilderness (Hallandåsen in northern Skåne, for those who care about the local geography). Although I regularly read books of various kinds, this week I read several books about self-managed or empowered organizations (including the books at the … Read more
Every week or so, I end up in a discussion about ecosystems, be it business ecosystems or software ecosystems. Interestingly, almost everyone I talk to takes a “descriptive” approach to their ecosystem of choice. They describe the ecosystem as a fact of life or a force of nature, like gravity, and often I get explained … Read more
This week was all about software architecture as we hosted the international conference on software architecture in Gothenburg (ICSA 2017). At the same time, I hosted a company get-together between, among others, Booking, Spotify and Klarna. During the get-together, the role of architecture also came up a number of times. I realized that the research … Read more
In almost every meeting that I have these days, the notion of organizational change comes up. Everyone is concerned with changing too slow and the risk of being disrupted by more agile and innovative competitors they haven’t even heard of. My role gives me the opportunity to talk to people at all levels in typical … Read more
