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.
I’m delighted to announce that my book Project to Product will be released at the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018 (Las Vegas), on Oct 22, 2018. As startups disrupt every market and tech giants pull further ahead of entrenched businesses, the majority of enterprise IT organizations are facing an existential crisis. Either they quickly become much...
Ever since I started bumping into him at countless conferences, the learning from my meetings with Gene Kim just keeps accelerating. I have never met anyone who can match Gene in channeling where the industry is at, seeing the vision for a better way, and bringing together the technologists and leaders who will get us...
Agile has won, and DevOps is now standard at startups worldwide. With all of the success stories we are hearing at nearly every conference we attend, why is it that the conversations within our conference rooms continue to bring up a lack of clear business results, or outright deployment and adoption failures? The success of...
Many organizations make the same mistakes when it comes to scaling Agile and DevOps and then attempt to rectify those mistakes by formulating a new strategy—only to miss the real reasons why the initiative failed. As someone who helps companies through software delivery transformations, I’ve seen my share of ineffective behaviors. What I find most...
Some of the most interesting problems in technology only surface at scale. For the past few years, the majority of Tasktop’s customers have been using Sync to achieve scaled Agile. Without tool chain integration, it is impossible to get hundreds or thousands of IT staff adopting enterprise Agile methodologies such as SAFe, DAD, Scrum.org’s Nexus...
“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” – William Gibson If you’re looking to predict how things should work in the future, start by looking in the right places in the present. Innovations in technology, management and collaboration that will change the way we work are already up and running...
Over the course of 2015 I got exposed to many companies going through Lean software delivery transformations–some very successful, but many less so. Tasktop’s customer base grew dramatically in 2014 and that growth accelerated in 2015. So I decided to put conference presentations on pause and instead spend more of 2015 on the road meeting...
At last week’s DevOps Enterprise Summit we got to hear how industry leaders are transforming the way that software is built. Most speakers told stories of automating the build, release or continuous delivery pipeline, and the cultural transformation that followed. One talk stood out from all the others because it described a transformation that went...
I’ve long taken inspiration from Peter Drucker’s caution that “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Technological progress has been punctuated by advances in measurement, ranging from Galileo’s telescope to Intel’s obsession with nanometers. Our industry is starting to go through a profound transformation in measuring how software is built, but only after...
From Galileo’s telescope to the scanning electron microscope, scientific progress has been punctuated by the technology that enabled new forms of measurement. Yet in the discipline of software delivery, robust measurement has been elusive. When I set out on a mission to double developer productivity, I ended up spending a good portion of my PhD...
