Articles

The decisions you make at the start of a software initiative are some of the hardest to undo later. Here are two architecture mistakes we frequently see – and what actually work...

A few months ago I wrote a text called “Dual-use” about how civilian concepts and thinking is being utilised with great success by the militaries. The example was DOT-Chain Defe...

According to Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and real life experience, good collaboration with the domain experts is of crucial importance when developing software. It’s amazingly po...

There's a particular kind of pressure that engineering leaders know well. A deadline is approaching, the team is working hard – everyone can see that – and yet the amount of wor...

It just doesn't make any sense! Your software team has been getting slower and slower up to a point where every new feature is painfully forced through the system, wrecking ever...

Earlier in my career, I’d automatically have said something like: being in a weightless state, without time and space, completely zoned in on what I’m doing. Someone even compar...

When I started my first large project as an independent consultant 33 years ago, I remember how I was welcomed by one of the most senior developers in the team I was hired to wo...

One thing we do at factor10 is software architecture reviews. We honestly can’t recall a single review that didn’t uncover valuable insights, reveal hidden opportunities, or giv...

Domain Primitives are described as the smallest building blocks in a domain model. A Domain Primitive is a small Value Object, a type that is primarily defined by its attributes...

In the beginning of my career, I discovered that having automated tests is invaluable when making changes to any non-trivial software system. Or, put differently, I realized tha...

In the team I work with, we have a sort of tradition of deploying on Friday afternoons. Why on earth are we doing this? A lot of teams have the opposite tradition to never deplo...

It’s been over 1.5 years since I last posted anything about “AI” so I felt it was time to share a few more thoughts. That last post explored how LLMs can be used in customer sol...

It’s been interesting (depressing) to see how a superpower nation we used to trust now makes it impossible to trust them. Lying, betraying and exploiting have that effect. Maybe...

When working with Suzi Edwards-Alexander and trying to find out what is good (and bad) about factor10, I've realised there are a few unconventional things about us that I'm prou...

This is me repeating a story from memory I read 30 years ago in a magazine. I’m afraid I have no references, but I like the story a lot so I’d like it to live on.

Continuous Integration, sometimes referred to as Trunk Based Development, is a development methodology where everyone integrates their work into the main branch at least daily.

We (at factor10) have been discussing the EU's Digital Operational Resilience Act lately, what it means, and what impact it might have.

When I first heard about pair programming I didn't like the concept. I'm much faster on my own without someone else slowing me down.

We’ve had the privilege to work with many great development organizations. So, we thought it would be nice to share a few of the insights we’ve gathered over the years on what s...

I have always liked this quote because I think it embodies an issue I see a lot in the software industry: We are in a hurry, so we take shortcuts. And then we pay the price of t...

Can we learn anything about testing from Sam Vimes of the Discworld novels?

I recently came across a thread discussing Test-Driven Development (TDD) on one of the major social networks. The discussion revolved around when to use TDD and when it can be s...

For the last five years I have been test driving pretty much all the code I have written. This is a retrospective on why it took so long to get started, where I see the greatest...

The fear of releasing is real, it is the fear of failure.

Ever since the start of factor10, I have considered Extreme Programming (XP) to be one of our cornerstones. So, as part of the onboarding for newcomers, we thought it would be f...

What is technical debt, who owns it and when is it due? Post #2 in a series of post about obstacles around software development.

Why do we have obstacles in software development when software is almost free from constraints?