About the Book
As software R&D investment increases, the benefits from short feedback cycles using technologies such as continuous deployment, experimentation-based development, and multidisciplinary teams require a fundamentally different strategy and process. This book will cover the three overall challenges that companies are grappling with: speed, data and ecosystems. Speed deals with shortening the cycle time in R&D. Data deals with increasing the use of and benefit from the massive amounts of data that companies collect. Ecosystems address the transition of companies from being internally focused to being ecosystem oriented by analyzing what the company is uniquely good at and where it adds value.
Table of Contents:
Part 1 Introduction. Introduction. Need for Speed. Viganbe. Part II Speed. Stairway to Heaven: Speed. Throughput vs. Responsiveness. Managing Architecture. Continuous Integration. Part III Data. Stairway to Heaven: Data. Feature Experimentation. Evidence Driven Development. Part IV. Ecosystems. Stairway to Heaven: Ecosystems. Three Layer Ecosystem Strategy Model. Implications of Software Ecosystems. Part V. Conclusion.
About the Author :
In the spring of 2011, after 8 years in industry, Jan Bosch returned to academia as a professor of software engineering at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. Earlier, he worked as VP Engineering Process and VP Open Innovation for Intuit in Mountain View, California. Prior to joining Intuit, he worked for several years at Nokia Research Center. Before that, he was a full professor of Software Engineering at the University of Groningen. His main research interests are in software architecture assessment, design and representation, software product lines, including variability management, organizational approaches and product family architecture design, design erosion, component-oriented software engineering, object-oriented frameworks and design patterns.
Review :
"This book gives you a great set of tools on how to bring business architecture and technology architecture together to drive a common set of goals and objectives."
– Brendan Bank, CTO Booking.com
"SDE offers a fascinating and well-researched overview of the major trends in the software industry. If you want to survive as a software company in the 21st century, add this wonderful book to your reading list."
– Jurgen Appelo, author of Management 3.0 and Managing for Happiness
"Jan Bosch has a unique background with both leading academic expertise and a profound industry experience, and utilizing his knowledge and ideas in conjunction with digitalization will result in great improvements and export values for Swedish companies. Jan Bosch is a pioneer in how he systematically demonstrates the strength of changing the perspective for working with software. He shows how new services, products and value is created by drawing on the deep knowledge software developers have of customers, coupled with tools such as software architecture knowledge and ways of working, user feedback and data collection."
– Ingrid Nordmark, CEO Swedish Institute for Computer Science
"Jan Bosch has compiled a book that describes the challenges and the opportunities all industries are facing connected to the increasing importance of software. The book addresses the dynamics in the world: changing needs, technology development and also globalization where new competitors appears and existing competitors reach new markets rapidly. These challenges requires speed, use of data (facts) for effective decision making and also clever use of collaborations with external organisations in s.c. eco-systems. Fortunately, the book also describes ways to meet these challenges and how to concretely achieve speed, use of data and effective use of eco-systems of partners. I really like the approach that the book takes to first describe the challenges and drivers for change, the why, in a management or strategy book manner, and then describe how and by who to meet these challenges in a way that engineers and practitioners can relate to. This means that this book is an excellent tool for a dialogue within a company between general management, middle management and senior engineers – which in fact is an imperative to survive in the future."
– Stefan Andersson, Director Future Aircraft Systems at Saab AB and Chairman of Swedsoft (www.swedsoft.se)
"The excellent book of Speed, Data and Ecosystems by Jan Bosch captures the essence for any industry and company that is in the process of transforming into a digital future. Jan Bosch builds his knowledge based on academic research and experience from the industry combining this into a holistic approach how to work with software leveraging from the opportunities and meeting the challenges.
The practices of agility, continuous integration and how to capture and manage the value of data that will turn into services and products combined with the need for speed in a collaborative way of working is an excellent opportunity to stimulate a needed dialog on many levels within a company."
– Mats Melander, Director Automation Solutions at Tetra Pak
"In an ever-changing world we all need to strive for speed with accuracy. Doing so can easily drive you and your company on bad paths and this is why evidence based software development becomes so crucial. Jan Bosch's book is a great read for anyone that want to make sure they build what actually has the intended impact on their business let alone doing it with great speed and minimal investment.
– David Rejdemyhr, Engineering Manager Klarna.
"If you're interested in how to manage things in R&D intensive companies, this is the book for you. You get a bleeding edge overview of the latest theories and models and how it all fits together. Best of all, it’s easy to read and it’s full of relevant practical ideas that I can use in my daily work. One thing is sure, I will be handing out copies of the book at my company."
– Pontus Bergendahl, Manager FW development at Axis Communications
"A must read for any leader or professional in the software industry. Simple but insightful Stairway models provide compelling and practical guidance for both every-day challenges and extensive transformations in the realm of software development."
– Mladen Pilipovic, Director of Engineering, Spotify
"During my 15 years working with strategy & business development I´ve read a lots of books, attended several conferences and hired consultants within the field. Prof. dr. ir. Jan Bosch plays in another league in comparison. His experience from business and his research makes his advice unique and invaluable for an old financial institutions struggling with digital transformation. Mr Bosch's advice on have to handle innovation in complex IT-system has been especially valuable for us. If I should recommend one person to talk to when it comes to innovation in the 21st century and one book to read it would be Mr Bosch's."
– Gustav Gorecki, strategy & business development within Storebrand, founder of several startups and ex Accenture strategy manager
"The software industry has been continuously speeding up the digital transformation of our lives. Repetitious manual work gets automated, systems become more autonomous. We are at the edge of autonomous driving, our kids hunt virtual comic figures in the real world, our bookkeeping is close to being fully automated. So-called algorithmic tasks become digital, while heuristic tasks, like creativity, stay with us humans.
Applying this to software development: In software development you can and must be smart, and you need to make use of the machines, not only during final code execution but also in every step of software development: automate every task, let the machines verify your code, free us of any tedious work, produce and consume data, and close the feedback loops between creators and end users.
On the other side, digital processes bring us knowledge in form of data in unprecedented dimensions: transactions, receipts, usage data of applications, etc. Managing the risks and obeying privacy - we should apply the available technology to make responsible and positive use of the available data. Whether it is really Big Data in the sense of extremely large and complex, or not, the evaluation of that data allows the machines to learn, predict, feedback, and potentially automate, based on patterns and correlations.
Thirdly, already half of the top 10 of the most valuable companies do not sell or deal with classic goods, but are creators and owners of powerful digital ecosystems. Ecosystems that scale not linearly, like typical manufacturing or trading, but exponentially by the number of partners in and users of the ecosystem.
This book unifies those three of the most current best practices of the software-driven industry: speed, data, and ecosystems. Speed in value creation through software, namely continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous experimentation. Data to feedback what we did is actually the most effective and efficient to create value. Ecosystems to supersede classical business models by factors. The book explains the relationships, gives examples, and guides you with frameworks so that the application in your next project will let you harvest all the smartness and profitability that is possible in todays software development."
– Michael Kircher, CTO DATEV eG, Germany
"Professor Jan Bosch has written a book that relates to the most important challenge that many companies are going through these years: Becoming more and more software dependent (Digitization). In fact, he puts words on and suggest solutions on how to adapt to this. I particularly like his "Stairway to Heaven" models that relate to Speed, Data and Ecosystems. I like the BAPO-model thinking and the three layer model. All these make it possible for Leaders and Employees that are not SW-experts to understand and suggest changes in their business to overcome the challenges."
—Jan Harding Gliemann, Senior R&D Director, GRUNDFOS, Denmark
"Volvo Group is a company where the amount of software is increasing rapidly. A majority of the new innovations in a truck and the transport system are based on software. Our ability to efficiently develop software and to reach our customers with new innovations, are already, and will increasingly in the future be a key competitive differentiator. With this book we get methods and tools to assess our software development maturity and the steps that we need to take to keep us being a leader in commercial transport solution taking full advantages of the possibilities that software and digitalization bring."
– Ted Kruse, Director Electrical & Embedded Systems, Advanced Technology & Research, Volvo Group Trucks Technology
"As an executive manager of a mid-size software product development organization, I found this book as an eye opener. The Stairway to Heaven concept in three areas (speed, data and ecosystem) is a recipe to transform not only the software development team but the whole company into an organization where all decisions are made based on facts, not opinion. New products are build much faster at much higher quality, features are determined based on data from real customers, and on top, development costs are greatly reduced. The steps are simple, the R&D organization organizes itself to deploy software much faster and get feedback from the field automatically, product management organization analyzes the feedback makes product decisions based on evidence and the company transitions from internally focused to ecosystem-centric allowing to focus on their core competencies and outsource all activities that are not strategic. Any professional involved in advanced software development must read this book."
– Metin Ismail Taskin, CTO AirTies
"This book gives you a great set of tools on how to bring business architecture and technology architecture together to drive a common set of goals and objectives."
– Brendan Bank, CTO Booking.com
"SDE offers a fascinating and well-researched overview of the major trends in the software industry. If you want to survive as a software company in the 21st century, add this wonderful book to your reading list."
– Jurgen Appelo, author of Management 3.0 and Managing for Happiness
"Jan Bosch has a unique background with both leading academic expertise and a profound industry experience, and utilizing his knowledge and ideas in conjunction with digitalization will result in great improvements and export values for Swedish companies. Jan Bosch is a pioneer in how he systematically demonstrates the strength of changing the perspective for working with software. He shows how new services, products and value is created by drawing on the deep knowledge software developers have of customers, coupled with tools such as software architecture knowledge and ways of working, user feedback and data collection."
– Ingrid Nordmark, CEO Swedish Institute for Computer Science
"Jan Bosch has compiled a book that describes the challenges and the opportunities all industries are facing connected to the increasing importance of software. The book addresses the dynamics in the world: changing needs, technology development and also globalization where new competitors appears and existing competitors reach new markets rapidly. These challenges requires speed, use of data (facts) for effective decision making and also clever use of collaborations with external organisations in s.c. eco-systems. Fortunately, the book also describes ways to meet these challenges and how to concretely achieve speed, use of data and effective use of eco-systems of partners. I really like the approach that the book takes to first describe the challenges and drivers for change, the why, in a management or strategy book manner, and then describe how and by who to meet these challenges in a way that engineers and practitioners can relate to. This means that this book is an excellent tool for a dialogue within a company between general management, middle management and senior engineers – which in fact is an imperative to survive in the future."
– Stefan Andersson, Director Future Aircraft Systems at Saab AB and Chairman of Swedsoft (www.swedsoft.se)
"The excellent book of Speed, Data and Ecosystems by Jan Bosch captures the essence for any industry and company that is in the process of transforming into a digital future. Jan Bosch builds his knowledge based on academic research and experience from the industry combining this into a holistic approach how to work with software leveraging from the opportunities and meeting the challenges.
The practices of agility, continuous integration and how to capture and manage the value of data that will turn into services and products combined with the need for speed in a collaborative way of working is an excellent opportunity to stimulate a needed dialog on many levels within a company."
– Mats Melander, Director Automation Solutions at Tetra Pak
"In an ever-changing world we all need to strive for speed with accuracy. Doing so can easily drive you and your company on bad paths and this is why evidence based software development becomes so crucial. Jan Bosch's book is a great read for anyone that want to make sure they build what actually has the intended impact on their business let alone doing it with great speed and minimal investment.
– David Rejdemyhr, Engineering Manager Klarna.
"If you're interested in how to manage things in R&D intensive companies, this is the book for you. You get a bleeding edge overview of the latest theories and models and how it all fits together. Best of all, it’s easy to read and it’s full of relevant practical ideas that I can use in my daily work. One thing is sure, I will be handing out copies of the book at my company."
– Pontus Bergendahl, Manager FW development at Axis Communications
"A must read for any leader or professional in the software industry. Simple but insightful Stairway models provide compelling and practical guidance for both every-day challenges and extensive transformations in the realm of software development."
– Mladen Pilipovic, Director of Engineering, Spotify
"During my 15 years working with strategy & business development I´ve read a lots of books, attended several conferences and hired consultants within the field. Prof. dr. ir. Jan Bosch plays in another league in comparison. His experience from business and his research makes his advice unique and invaluable for an old financial institutions struggling with digital transformation. Mr Bosch's advice on have to handle innovation in complex IT-system has been especially valuable for us. If I should recommend one person to talk to when it comes to innovation in the 21st century and one book to read it would be Mr Bosch's."
– Gustav Gorecki, strategy & business development within Storebrand, founder of several startups and ex Accenture strategy manager
"The software industry has been continuously speeding up the digital transformation of our lives. Repetitious manual work gets automated, systems become more autonomous. We are at the edge of autonomous driving, our kids hunt virtual comic figures in the real world, our bookkeeping is close to being fully automated. So-called algorithmic tasks become digital, while heuristic tasks, like creativity, stay with us humans.
Applying this to software development: In software development you can and must be smart, and you need to make use of the machines, not only during final code execution but also in every step of software development: automate every task, let the machines verify your code, free us of any tedious work, produce and consume data, and close the feedback loops between creators and end users.
On the other side, digital processes bring us knowledge in form of data in unprecedented dimensions: transactions, receipts, usage data of applications, etc. Managing the risks and obeying privacy - we should apply the available technology to make responsible and positive use of the available data. Whether it is really Big Data in the sense of extremely large and complex, or not, the evaluation of that data allows the machines to learn, predict, feedback, and potentially automate, based on patterns and correlations.
Thirdly, already half of the top 10 of the most valuable companies do not sell or deal with classic goods, but are creators and owners of powerful digital ecosystems. Ecosystems that scale not linearly, like typical manufacturing or trading, but exponentially by the number of partners in and users of the ecosystem.
This book unifies those three of the most current best practices of the software-driven industry: speed, data, and ecosystems. Speed in value creation through software, namely continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous experimentation. Data to feedback what we did is actually the most effective and efficient to create value. Ecosystems to supersede classical business models by factors. The book explains the relationships, gives examples, and guides you with frameworks so that the application in your next project will let you harvest all the smartness and profitability that is possible in todays software development."
– Michael Kircher, CTO DATEV eG, Germany
"Professor Jan Bosch has written a book that relates to the most important challenge that many companies are going through these years: Becoming more and more software dependent (Digitization). In fact, he puts words on and suggest solutions on how to adapt to this. I particularly like his "Stairway to Heaven" models that relate to Speed, Data and Ecosystems. I like the BAPO-model thinking and the three layer model. All these make it possible for Leaders and Employees that are not SW-experts to understand and suggest changes in their business to overcome the challenges."
—Jan Harding Gliemann, Senior R&D Director, GRUNDFOS, Denmark
"Volvo Group is a company where the amount of software is increasing rapidly. A majority of the new innovations in a truck and the transport system are based on software. Our ability to efficiently develop software and to reach our customers with new innovations, are already, and will increasingly in the future be a key competitive differentiator. With this book we get methods and tools to assess our software development maturity and the steps that we need to take to keep us being a leader in commercial transport solution taking full advantages of the possibilities that software and digitalization bring."
– Ted Kruse, Director Electrical & Embedded Systems, Advanced Technology & Research, Volvo Group Trucks Technology
"As an executive manager of a mid-size software product development organization, I found this book as an eye opener. The Stairway to Heaven concept in three areas (speed, data and ecosystem) is a recipe to transform not only the software development team but the whole company into an organization where all decisions are made based on facts, not opinion. New products are build much faster at much higher quality, features are determined based on data from real customers, and on top, development costs are greatly reduced. The steps are simple, the R&D organization organizes itself to deploy software much faster and get feedback from the field automatically, product management organization analyzes the feedback makes product decisions based on evidence and the company transitions from internally focused to ecosystem-centric allowing to focus on their core competencies and outsource all activities that are not strategic. Any professional involved in advanced software development must read this book."
– Metin Ismail Taskin, CTO AirTies
