Mik Kersten
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Mik Kersten

Dr. Mik Kersten started his career as a Research Scientist at Xerox PARC where he created the first aspect-oriented development environment. He then pioneered the integration of development tools with Agile and DevOps as part of his Computer Science PhD at the University of British Columbia. Founding Tasktop out of that research, Mik has written over one million lines of open source code that are still in use today, and he has brought seven successful open-source and commercial products to market. Mik’s experiences working with some of the largest digital transformations in the world has led him to identify the critical disconnect between business leaders and technologists. Since then, Mik has been working on creating new tools and a new framework - the Flow Framework™ - for connecting software value stream networks and enabling the shift from project to product. Mik lives with his family in Vancouver, Canada, and travels globally, sharing his vision for transforming how software is built, and is the author of Project To Product, a book that helps IT organizations survive and thrive in the Age of Software.

The Unicorn Project Review: Finding Flow with the Five Ideals 

A year ago Gene Kim and I were sitting at a bar in Detroit, discussing the Gemba Walk that we were invited to by Chris O’Malley, the CEO of Compuware. That conversation quickly turned to a problem that Gene had with the current state of The Unicorn Project. The characters were there, the plot was...

Reflections from a Year of Project to Product

Today marks one year since Project to Product was published. The book details my journey from empathizing with the frustrations of developers trying to deliver value to customers, to empathizing with the frustrations of entire organizations dealing with the onslaught of digital disruption. Helping developers was fairly straightforward, as that could be done with tools...

Measuring What Matters in Software Delivery: The Planview Viz Story

Scientific and technological revolutions have been catalyzed by breakthroughs in measurement.  From Galileo’s telescope to tunneling electron microscopes, innovations in how we measure the world have been at the core of paradigm shifts. Measurements of the exchange of value and risk have produced the financial system that defines the world economy. With the underpinnings of...

What Software Needs to Learn from Physical Product Delivery

In the Age of Mass Production, which began at the turn of the 20th century, we witnessed engineering organizations master complex product delivery.  Since that time, product complexity has continued to grow, fueled recently by an ever-growing number of electronic and software components. For example, in the 2000s, approximately 40 percent of a car’s cost...

Why we need a shared understanding of technical debt

Helping business leaders and technologists to speak the same language is a key purpose of Project to Product and the goal of the Flow Framework™. After all, both IT leaders and business executives share the same objective; to bring more value to the internal and external customers that we serve. Given the massive investment that organizations are making...