Your path to business agility
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.
To enable your teams to build great software, start by identifying and empowering your Value Stream Architect. The Age of Software is not only creating new markets and disruptors in existing markets; it’s also expanding existing roles within organizations. In this post, I’ll describe what I see as one of the most important new roles...
Throughout this series of articles, I have been exploring the state of the practice in DevOps, summarizing recent trends in scaling software delivery. In this post – originally written for a special issue of IEEE Software to celebrate software engineering’s 50th anniversary – I look further ahead to consider how software engineering will evolve over...
This blog was originally posted on the IT Revolution blog on December 18, 2018. Project to Product tells a story of what we can learn about building software by walking down the BMW Group Leipzig plant production line. The other wonder of mass production that makes repeated appearances throughout the book is the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which has...
This blog was originally posted on the IT Revolution blog on November 19, 2018. We learn through stories—either through our own or through those passed on by others that we admire. When I first read The Phoenix Project, I was amazed at how much technological wisdom could be passed on in story form. That story, perhaps more than any...
The back cover of the Project to Product book states that: “All author royalties will be donated to the P2P scholarship and not-for-profit organizations supporting diversity, women, and minorities in technology”. This post provides a short summary into why I decided to do this, and why I think this mission is important and aligned with...
Throughout this Project to Product series I’ve explored how we need to bring the same rigor to architecting our software delivery value streams as what we’re witnessing in advanced manufacturing plants. Once we agree on what flows, we can analyze those flows to identify bottlenecks and opportunities to remove them. However, every time I’ve asked...
To learn more about what works and what doesn’t in large-scale DevOps and agile deployments, we need data. The problem is, that data is notoriously difficult to get ahold of because much of it lies hidden across numerous private repositories. Efforts such as The State of DevOps reports have helped us gain some understanding by...
Any discussion of how to scale the benefits of DevOps invariably lands on tools. The planning, tracking, automation, and management tools we use define the “ground truth” of where and how work happens. One of the most interesting, and at times challenging, aspects of agile and DevOps transformations is the sheer volume of tools involved....
I recently visited the BMW Group’s Leipzig plant. My goal was to brainstorm with BMW Group IT leaders on how we could seamlessly integrate production lines with the software lifecycle. I was also interested in learning more about how BMW approaches car production as I was in the midst of defining the Flow Framework™ for...
The launch of my upcoming book, Project to Product (pre-order here), will be on October 20th, and I’ll be previewing it at one of my favourite events of the year, DevOps Enterprise Summit, Las Vegas (October 22-24). In the lead up to the launch, I will post a series of blogs related to the genesis...
