Jan Bosch
When I worked in the field of software architecture in the 1990s, the general belief was that the upfront design of a software architecture was critically important as it would be exceedingly difficult to change it once you’d committed to it and started development. I was one of the propagators of this notion and did … Read more
For almost all of human history, we lived in scarcity. We lacked food, housing and safety and lived in small communities that could easily be wiped out by competing tribes. It’s hard to imagine for most of us, but famines occurred regularly. Warfare between tribes was the norm in many regions of the world. And … Read more
When Western society to a large extent was religious, Christianity offered a ready-made framework for meaning and purpose. The promise of an eternal afterlife offers a powerful incentive to live life in a way that contributes to the community you’re part of. Humans have an internal moral framework and religion aligns with that framework in … Read more
Life at work, as well as outside of work, can be very surprising. Lots of unexpected and unwelcome things can happen. Interestingly, if you look at how modern society organizes itself, you realize that much of what we spend time and energy on is concerned with creating predictability in our lives. The houses we live … Read more
One of my favorite activities when meeting with the companies I work with is to tell them that their customer doesn’t give a flying hoot about their product. This often leads to a storm of protests and objections and meeting participants proudly showing me net promoter scores and quotes from customers where they express their … Read more
Humans love to think in terms of absolutes. We like to set a target, work really hard toward it and have the illusion that when we reach it all our troubles will be gone and we’ll be in a state of permanent bliss. For instance, sports competitions have a very clear target and those of … Read more
Traditional companies building products including mechanics, electronics and software tend to focus on the bill of materials (BOM), standard unit cost (SUC) or some other KPI tracking the per-product instance cost during manufacturing. When manufacturing large numbers of the same product for extended periods, this makes perfect sense as every penny saved is multiplied over … Read more
One of the human behaviors that never ceases to amaze me is the gap between what people say they do and what they actually do. In management research, this is often referred to as espoused theory versus theory in use. When it comes to digitalization and working with data, I see a similar pattern in … Read more
One of the popular metaphors for software development that annoys me to no end is the notion of a software factory. Even if the underlying concept is concerned with well-defined processes and structured ways of working, the image it draws up in my mind is that of a production line. And it pictures software engineers … Read more
In most of the companies I work with, the decision to develop a new product is made based on an assessment of the likely revenue and margin the product will create. This assumes a clear specification of the intended functionality of the product as a basis for the cost estimation associated with the development of … Read more
