The Art of Improving Software: Legacy Evolution, Done Right

This SkillsCast is currently only available to registered attendees of Software Architecture Gathering Digital 2021

It will be freely available to all Skills Matter members once the Software Architecture Gathering Digital 2021 early-access window expires on January 14, 2022.

As software developers, we spend most our time maintaining existing systems – under time and budget pressure. Building new business functionality tends to get more difficult, expensive and risky over time due to increasing size, growing complexity and lack of overview. Although we complain about technical debt, lack of innovation and the architectural deficits of historically grown software, we often patch, fix or hack symptoms instead of curing the root causes of these problems. In this talk you’ll get an overview of the systematically improving or modernizing your system. The approach shown here is based upon the established idea of identifying the specific problems first, before changing or modifying a system. We will take a closer look at different areas of investigation, such as architecture, code, technology, quality requirements, application data plus development and rollout processes, in an iterative breadth-first analysis. For each area of investigation I give examples and show methodical tools for effective and practical use. Afterwards you’ll get an overview of strategical and tactical approaches to specific improvements, based upon the problems and risks found during analysis.

The presentation is aimed at software development teams, architects, product owners and technical management. Everything I present in this talk has been proven in software and system projects and reviews I conducted over the last couple of years in various industries – so expect some (anonymized) practical examples!

Download Slides as PDF

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE:

• Domain Models in Practice with Marco Heimeshoff (Online Course on 8th - 12th November 2021)
• Domain-Driven Design Hands-On Workshop: A DDD-traineeship at "Carries Cars" (Online Meetup on 26th October 2021)
• Understanding Microservices: A Guide for the Monolithic Developer (SkillsCast recorded in October 2021)
• F# Gives You Superpowers (SkillsCast recorded in October 2021)