Brainport should export its world-class software engineering capabilities

I’ve spent the last 10+ years declaiming on and off that the Brainport region is a world leader in software engineering. This belief was based on my experience of technical sales visits to and running workshops for quite a large range of software-developing companies in Germany, India, Scandinavia and elsewhere. One can tell a lot about the maturity of a software development team by the questions they ask. The deep, insightful and challenging questions we used to get about Dezyne from Brainport companies were in a different league from those that we got from teams outside of our region. Of course, this is a superficial measure of the maturity of a given team. Nevertheless, when repeated frequently enough, one starts to get a feel for the state of software engineering in other industries and regions.

It seemed to me that the worst offenders were often automotive companies and their tier-one suppliers. The software development teams in these organizations seemed to be stuck in some sort of through-the-looking-glass world called Autosar, where common words and concepts seemed to have a different meaning. Whenever we talked about event-driven, service-oriented systems, we were often met with blank stares. I could never quite figure out the nature of the problem or how to bridge the communication gap. And so we never managed to gain a foothold in the automotive world.