Jan Bosch
One of the most interesting patterns that I have observed again and again is that any organization tends to create layer upon layer of bureaucracy over time. Although I can’t find the reference, I remember reading somewhere that any organization increases bureaucracy with 0.7% per year. In my experience, this is a gross underestimation. Often … Read more
Many understand the importance of trust in a society. The ability to park your car somewhere and know it will be there, undamaged when you get back. Booking and paying for a travel ticket or hotel room before arriving and knowing that it will be there. Working for an employer and knowing that there will … Read more
After another week on the road, I am typing these words late Friday evening on a plane home. I spent time with three different companies (who shall remain unnamed) this week and on the way back I was reflecting on the commonalities of what I learned this week. The main lesson was: lots of activity; … Read more
There are few sessions at companies that I run or participate in where there isn’t some form of firefighting that makes it into the discussion. In virtually every company, there are situations where a critical bug is found in the field, the CEO of a customer company escalates to senior management, a critical project is … Read more
With artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning on the top of Gartner’s hype cycle, it is easy to assume that computers will program themselves going forward and that we’ve reached the end of software engineering as a discipline. Although one might naively think that we can just feed a lot of data into a … Read more
During the last months, I have run into several situations where folks outside of R&D considered this concept of agile a nice little toy for the propeller-heads in software, rather than something that is in service of the company. In many cases, these people are stuck in a waterfall mindset and feel that it’s perfectly … Read more
This week I gave a keynote at the SANER 2018 conference in Campobasso, Italy. After the talk, some journalist from RAI asked me to do an interview with him about the topics above and I realized that although I have opinions about these topics, it’s pretty hard to quickly pull all that together on the … Read more
This week, I came across a concept from Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, where he distinguishes human beings from other creatures in that we can create an idea in the theater of our imagination. We test the idea against other ideas that we have or others have or even against the world. And … Read more
Why Fast Feedback Cycles Matter from Jan Bosch.
When studying software-intensive systems companies, one of the interesting observations is that they all evolve in the same way. In earlier research, we have referred to this as the “Stairway to Heaven”. In the figure below, the speed dimension of the Stairway to Heaven model is shown. This model is a descriptive model based on … Read more
