Time-Oriented Software Development: The new kid on the agile block
TOSD promises to become a strong addition to the Agile playbook. And it's already being put to work
I took the photo above on the day I met Sebastian Kubsch in person for the first time. That was bout 14 months ago. When I inquired about the shirt, Sebastian told me: "I enjoyed reading about the BetaCodex concepts so much I just had to get this T-shirt printed". Little wonder then, you might say, that more than mere business-as-usual is emerging from our collaboration.
Since that day in the Summer of 2024, Sebastian's company, Pradtke GmbH, headquartered in Bochum/Germany, undertook a full-fledged Beta transformation with the OpenSpace Beta approach; it adopted its decentralized Cell Structure Design with eight periphery cells in November 2024, streamlining administration and operations in the process; during the 1st semester of 2025, the company successfully turned its business model upside-down. All that with a little help from
and . At some point during this year, Sebastian took on the newly created role of CTO of Pradtke, much to my delight.In August, Sebastian and I, together with general managers Marc Otten and
, started putting Time Oriented Software Development (TOSD) into practice – fleshing out the approach further. Some of you may remember that I reported on the birth of the concept at the beginning of August on this channel, in a video update from Berlin. About two weeks later, we were already starting to deploy the approach at Pradtke, in sync with the company’s approximately two dozen software developers.Time-orientation certainly opens up a revolutionary way of thinking about agile software development. I have posted about time-orientation quite a bit lately, here and on the Red42 substack. Perhaps time-orientation will result in the much-needed shift in the way we organize software development, software companies and tech firms. We clearly need that move beyond Scrum, Kanban, Lean and Agile scaling, I think, if we want to finally make agility worth the name happen. I am confident that time-orientation can ignite that shift.
Today, Pradtke is entering its 4th week of TOSD. So far, every week has brought a new dynamic, new interventions and growing software development effectiveness. Sebastian Kubsch and I will soon lay out the story of how the new TOSD approach came about in more detail, in the 26th BetaCodex Network research paper. We will share how TOSD is being deployed at Pradtke, how the transformation to TOSD is unfolding, and how this new open source approach can help software companies and tech firms around the world. You can already find a sneak preview of our forthcoming research paper on Time-Oriented Software Development on the BetaCodex website. We intend to publish the paper during the month of October. On 7 November, I will likely use the occasion of my opening keynote at Regional Scrum Gathering Belgrade, to talk a bit about TOSD, too. Meet me in Serbia in November, if you like and if you can find the time!
I am looking forward to your questions and comments, as always!
