Your Ecosystem Has 50 Shades Of Gray

Another week on the road and another set of discussions around business and software ecosystems. Although it is clear that the ability of a company to build an ecosystem around its business is replacing company size as a, or perhaps the, key differentiator, I notice that there is a lot of confusion about what being … Read more

Don’t Get Stuck In Your Company’s Echo Chamber

The last weeks, I have attended several conferences and events and I have noticed a remarkable difference between public and company internal conferences. The internal conferences have a tendency to have a set of themes that everyone talks about in the same way. Whether it’s ecosystems, blockchain, artificial intelligence or any other popular topic, everyone … Read more

Stop Wasting Resources And Do Platforms Already!

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

Stop Thinking It’s Not Your Problem

(image credit: pixabay) Engineers form the core of a product company. Although I have the greatest respect for sales people and know how hard a job that can be, it’s the engineers that design and develop the product that, in the end, is needed to have anything to sell. Building a product that sells of … Read more

Engineering Deep Learning Systems is Hard!

(Image credit: pixabay) This week I spent in the lovely city of Prague, attending the SEAA 2018 conference. The main reason for attending was that I had the opportunity to present a paper that I co-authored with colleagues from Peltarion about the software engineering challenges of deep learning. Peltarion offers an amazing platform for building … Read more

Five Reasons Why You Are Not Data-Driven

  (Photo by Arif Wahid on Unsplash) This week I spent a lot of time with companies talking about data and using data for a variety of purposes, ranging from improved decision making to machine learning and deep learning systems. All companies I talk to have tons of data in their archives and often generate … Read more

Projects Suck; Do Products Instead!

Image credit: pixabay With the vacation in the Nordics largely over, I have had the opportunity again to spend time with several companies over the last week. I noticed a pattern that I had seen before but didn’t really reflect upon: whenever a company that I work with is experiencing difficulty in changing to where … Read more

Does Agile Kill Innovation?

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

Towards Dataism

Over the last months, one of the books that I’ve been reading is Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari. It’s a really worthwhile read and I can warmly recommend it. One of the key ideas that he brings up in the last part of the book is the evolution of religions that mankind seems to … Read more

Stop Complaining About Agile

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