Software assessment: the discipline of technical decision making

Thursday, 1:00 PM EST

Looking at what occupies most of our energy during software development, our domain is primarily a decision making business rather than construction one. As a consequence, we should invest in a systematic discipline to approach making decisions.

Assessment denotes the process of understanding a given situation about a software system to support decision making.
During software development, engineers spend as much as 50% of the overall effort on doing precisely that: they try to understand the current status of the system to know what to do next. In other words, assessing the current system accounts for half of the development budget. These are just the direct costs. The indirect costs can be seen in the quality of the decisions made as a result.

One might think that an activity that has such a large economical impact would be a topic of high debate and improvement. Instead, it is typically treated like the proverbial elephant in the room. In this talk, we argue that we need to:
• Make assessment explicit. Ignoring it won’t make it go away. By acknowledging its existence you have a chance of learning from past experiences and of optimizing your approach.
• Tailor assessment. Currently, developers try to assess the system by reading the source code. This is highly ineffective in many situations, and it simply does not scale to the size of the modern systems. You need tools, but not any tools. Your system is special and your most important problems will be special as well. That is why generic tools that produce nice looking reports won’t make a difference. You need smart tools that are tailored to your needs.
• Educate ourselves. The ability to assess is a skill. Like any skill, it needs to be educated. Enterprises need to understand that they need to allocate the budget for those custom tools, and engineers need to understand that it is within their reach to build them. It’s not rocket science. It just requires a different focus.

Explainable software

Thursday, 2:30 PM EST

Software systems should not remain black boxes. In this talk we show how we can complement domain-driven design with tools that match the ubiquitous language with visual representations of the system that are produced automatically. We experiences of building concrete systems, and, by means of live demos, we exemplify how changing the approach and the nature of the tools allows non-technical people to understand the inner workings of a system.

Software appears to be hard to grasp especially for non-technical people, and it often gets treated as a black box, which leads to inefficient decisions. This must and can change.

In this talk we show how by changing our tools we can expose the inner workings of a system with custom visual representations that can be produced automatically. These representations enhance the ubiquitous language and allow non-technical people to engage actively with the running system.

We start from describing experiences of building concrete systems, and, by means of live demos, we exemplify how changing the approach and the nature of the tools allows non-technical people to understand the inner workings of a system. We then take a step back and learn how we should emphasize decision making in software development as an explicit discipline at all layers, including the technical ones. This talk is accompanied is relevant for both technical and non-technical people.

Storytelling in a technical world

Thursday, 4:00 PM EST

Our technical world is governed by facts. In this world Excel files and technical diagrams are everywhere, and too often this way of looking at the world makes us forget that the goal of our job is to produce value, not to fulfill specifications.

Feedback is the central source of agile value. The most effective way to obtain feedback from stakeholders is a demo. Good demos engage. They materialize your ideas and put energies in motion. They spark the imagination and uncover hidden assumptions. They make feedback flow.

But, if a demo is the means to value, shouldn’t preparing the demo be a significant concern? Should it not be part of the definition of done?

That is not even all. A good demo tells a story about the system. This means that you have to make the system tell that story. Not a user story full of facts. A story that makes users want to use the system. That tiny concern can change the way you build your system. Many things go well when demos come out right.

Demoing is a skill, and like any skill, it can be trained. Regardless of the subject, there always is an exciting demo lurking underneath. It just takes you to find it. And to do it.

In this session we will get to exercise that skill.