Stop Talking About Agile

This week I spent time at several conferences and I noticed something surprising: Almost 20 years after the publication of the Agile Manifesto, there are STILL people talking about their agile transformation and consultant companies talking about the challenges of adopting agile practices. What in heaven’s name is going on here? Let’s be clear here: … Read more

Don’t Focus On Outcomes

During a number of discussions the last weeks, the notion of outcomes and disappointment with outcomes was brought up. The tendency in these conversations is an endless exploration of the reasons the unsatisfactory outcome happened (or, occasionally, why the unexpectedly positive outcome happened). Quickly people start to disagree and provide arguments for alternative points of … Read more

Towards Operational AI

In the latest two articles, I outlined the two phases of adopting machine & deep learning (ML/DL). In the figure below, we show the steps that companies typically evolve through while adopting AI, ML and DL solutions. As shown in the figure, the third step, the subject of this article, is where ML/DL components are … Read more

Machine & Deep Learning: Experimentation Stage

This week I got the opportunity to speak at the initiative seminar organized by the Chalmers AI Research center (CHAIR). The key message in my presentation was that working with artificial intelligence (AI) and specifically machine & deep learning (ML/DL) constitutes a major software engineering challenge that is severely underestimated by companies that start to … Read more

It’s All About Your Digital Twin

As I have been writing about adopting data-driven decision making in the broad sense and data-driven development more narrowly over the last weeks, several people have reached out to me, discussed with me and more generally explored the subject with me. During these engagements, I realized that many products and services exist for the sole … Read more

How To Deliver Proven Business Value

As companies adopt data-driven development, there is an interesting pattern that is concerned with selecting the factors that we’re optimizing for. The goal, in the end, is to influence business level key performance indicators (KPIs) such as revenue, margins, net promoter score, etc. However, these KPIs tend to change very slowly and are lagging indicators. … Read more

Why It’s Not About Speed

We live in a world that is driven by a Need for Speed and when leaders mention agility, continuous integration and continuous deployment, often speed is mentioned as the key driver. Having worked with dozens of companies, my learning is that companies go through a number of evolution steps in order to work with speed. … Read more

Why You Need To Slice Your Features

In the posts from the last weeks, I discussed the first two steps in adopting data-driven development (see figure below), i.e. modeling feature value and building the necessary infrastructure. Once we have described the value that we expect from a feature and have constructed the infrastructure required to capture the data coming back from the … Read more