For a technology company, building a strong engineering culture is essential for long-term success. Today's software industry is growing so fast that a large proportion of developers will inevitably have less than 5 years experience. At the same time, many software systems contain code that is ten, twenty or even thirty years old.

It's a constant challenge to communicate a healthy culture to newcomers and prevent technical debt from getting out of control. Technical coaching is all about…

"Ich hatte keine Zeit, den Zaun zu flicken" - Dieses Zitat kennt wohl jeder, und doch ertappen wir uns selbst, unseren Zaun nicht geflickt, sondern stattdessen die Hühner gesucht zu haben.
Doch wie ändere ich das?
Dieser Vortrag zeigt mit dem Konzept der MLCs ein Tool auf, dieser Falle zu begegnen und sich selbst und andere in den Modus des kontinuierlichen Lernens zu versetzen.
Am Ende haben die Zuhörenden einen ersten MLC durchlaufen und ein Tool erlernt, um sich und anderen den Freiraum zum…

"If you can't measure it, you can't improve it." Although it is (relatively) easy to measure objectively quantifiable decision criteria such as profit, how does one measure "soft" attributes, such as psychological safety or team dynamics, to judge an intervention's success?

This talk will present insights into the practical application of leading-edge research into what makes intelligent, high-performing teams and organisations, exploring the science behind the current buzzwords of…

Measuring quality requires many questions to be answered. The most obvious ones may be: “What is quality?”, but also “How can we measure it?”, “Which metrics are most accurate?”, “Which are most practical?”.

In this talk, I share some general motivations for measuring quality. I review commonly used metrics that claim to measure quality, I rate them with regards to how they may be helpful or harmful to achieve actual goals. I give some examples how the weaknesses of one metric might be…

UI testing is an essential part of software development. But the automation of UI tests is still considered too complex and flaky.
This talk will cover the "state of the art" of UI testing with an overview of tools and techniques. It will be shown which kind of representations are used by today's test tools and how the addressing of elements in the UI is done.
In addition, the role of artificial intelligence in the different approaches is shown and a prediction of testing tools of the future is…

When we talk about leadership and balance, we also need to talk about how we handle toxic behaviour in our midst and how we protect ourselves and our communities from it. As a full-time open source maintainer and project leader, I've sadly had to encounter many ungrateful, entitled or outright toxic people.

In this session I'll first show some examples, then share some coping strategies that I've successfully used to deal with them. I'll also share some things that everyone can do to help with…

Zero Trust Architecture has become the norm for how to modernize IT security in an age of growing network complexity and fewer ways to define hard network boundaries. Today, APIs are a standard way of how organizations expose both technical and business capabilities. But what does it mean for an API to be "Zero Trust Ready"?

In this presentation we look at some of the general patterns that APIs need to follow for Zero Trust readiness. We also look at some concrete practices for how to follow…

For a microservices architecture to be successful it is crucial to have the right boundaries between the microservices. But where are the right boundaries? We would like to present a tool that helps us answer this question.

Domain Storytelling is a collaborative modeling method. It brings together domain experts and development teams. We let our users tell us stories about their work. While listening, we record the stories using a pictographic language.

In this talk we show how to find…

At first glance, testing AI systems seems very different from testing “conventional” systems. However, many standard testing activities can be preserved as they are or only need small extensions.

In this talk, we give an overview of topics that will help you test AI systems: Attributes of training/testing/validation data, model performance metrics, and the statistical nature of AI systems. We will then relate these to testing tasks and show you how to integrate them.

Target Audience:…

The developers have instrumented the applications with OpenTelemetry — great! But that doesn't mean you're ready to roll it out in production yet. What do you need to keep in mind for your instrumentation infrastructure?

* Quick OpenTelemetry overview.
* Tradeoffs between the three architectures you use with OTel (depending on your vendor): vendor exporter vs OTel Collector vs OTel protocol support
* Sampling, including head vs tail based, and how to keep it representative and / or useful.

Targ…

Many approaches to software architecture assume that architecture be planned at the beginning from the project's quality goals. This is problematic as the macroarchitecture is hard to change, and the quality goals it's based on tend to be unknown at the beginning of a project, or change later. Consequently, it would really be preferable if we could defer the macroarchitectural decisions until later.

This talk shows how to do this using systematic modelling and functional programming.

Target…

Re-purchasing an application is seen as the top of craftsmanship for cloud migrations. But people have rarely seen such a project in practice. This is the courageous journey of a real consumer product running on expensive infrastructure for years with 2 million active users and more than 6PB of data.

The talk takes you on a journey to a German public cloud and shares all the learnings - about shifting massive data, about terraforming infrastructures, about customizing open source and about all…

In recent decades, our scientific and clinical understanding of how our nervous system works has increased tremendously. I’ve recently completed an education for trauma-informed work (NARM informed professional). It has changed many key aspects of how I teach and coach and will continue to have a large impact.

In this session, I’m presenting those key learnings, connecting them to well-known parts of Agile knowledge and inviting into a discussion of what a more trauma-informed approach to…

I will share our hands-on experience with a cloud native (container) transformation that is currently unfolding. Technically, implementing an Open Shift Container Platform (bare metal) is pretty challenging. Doing this in a way that we will have pretty stuff in our data centers and at the same time making sure that our technical possibilities are actually being used effectively by product developers ... is a different challenge all together.

Join this session if you'd like to hear what we…

"We're looking for passionate programmers!" says the job ad. Passion is used to evoke single-mindedness, drive and intensity. There is more than one kind of passion, and when raw passion is tempered with compassion and dispassion, we start to see a more balanced way of development.

Good development draws on both creativity and rationality, on both experience and experimentation, on both focus and connection, on both individual skill and group intelligence. Let's explore the many passions of…

IT is always changing ... In this talk I'll do some crystal ball gazing from two perspectives. At heart, I’m a tester. For two years I’ve also been a CEO. I’ll look at what factors are at work and what kinds of effects will they have on how we work and the roles of testers and software professionals.

Alongside musings about the future, I’ll talk about concrete activities on an individual and company level to best prepare ourselves for this nebulous future.

Target Audience: Everyone
Prerequisite…

Discipline, determination, a highly visible area, and a few sticky notes, are all you need to move beyond problems with technical debt.

Target Audience: Developers, Project Leader, Designers, Product Owners, Decision Makers
Prerequisites: Basic Knowledge of Software Development Process
Level: Basic

Extended Abstract:
## Making great software is challenging
It doesn't matter how qualified a team is, it will never be able to produce perfect, flawless, entirely bug-free software.
While teams are…

Even in the time of agile software development and devOps, maintenance and evolution of large-scale software systems remain challenging. This is not only caused by technical debt, but is heavily caused by lost knowledge, high complexity of micro-service architectures, difficult requirements management, not available documentation, and the complexity of communication among and coordination of the many stakeholders. In our session we will talk about the challenges we identified in our study and…

How much design is enough design? How much is overdesign? When does — or should — design happen? How big is 'design'?
Anyone who has ever looked at the methodology landscape or has juggled different roles in software development — programmer, architect, coach, therapist, code paramedic, politician — knows that there are many answers to these questions, and they often contradict one another.

In this talk, we will consider different scales and time frames of design in software, bringing some…

Unfortunately, this presentation has to be cancelled at short notice for personal reasons.

Traditional (i.e. hands-off, blessed-few) approaches to architecture rarely (if ever) work. But in the world of microservices, autonomous teams, and continuous delivery, architecture is more important than ever. Is there an alternative?

Target Audience: Architecture Practitioners (Architects, Lead Developers, etc.)
Prerequisites: Experience delivering software architecture
Level: Advanced

Extended…

Firmen können kaum noch IT-Systeme neu entwickeln, ohne dass existierende Funktionalität mitwandert. Vor die Aufgabe gestellt, ein System von einem Fremdanbieter in eine Public Cloud zu überführen, hat sich gezeigt, dass hilfreiche Wanderführer rar sind.
Diese Session strukturiert Entscheidungswege und Erkenntnisse bei Cloud-basierten Migrationsvorhaben - abgeleitet aus der Migration und Modernisierung von einem Konsumenten-Service mit 6 PB Daten und ca. 2 Mio. Nutzern.

Zielpublikum:…

Modernization projects are not a straight line as there’s no one-stop shop. Balance is definitely the right word: we talk here about finding the proper trade-off between quality/costs/timeframe requirements and customized patterns for a successful legacy system modernization. Based on actual use cases, we’ll discuss the available solutions (ERP implementation, code rewriting, middleware, cloud…), and see why combining the relevant tools is key.
Let us take you on a modernization journey and get…

There are many discussions, slogans, and myths out there when it comes to sustainability. But what is behind all those slogans? What does “carbon neutral” really mean and how does it compare to “net-zero”? Is my cloud really running on renewable energy? What are the low-hanging fruits when it comes to reducing carbon emissions? And how does “carbon offsetting” really work?

This session explains all those slogans and concepts, sheds some light at common myths, and provides the audience with a…

The topic of Green Software is very important because software is everywhere and affects the environment indirectly through the usage of hardware. Jochen Joswig explains what Green Software means and more detailed how energy demand can rise through software usage. There are different degrees of software effects on the environment that can be considered and evaluated. Jochen Joswig is furthermore researching green software metrics, approaches, quality criteria and how they can be applied in the…

This talk explains how Scenario Casting enables agile teams to pull together despite diverse ideas and concerns - in three iterative collaborative steps:
1. Find example scenarios of how ideas and concerns affect the domain - strictly in domain language! This provides an initial Scenario Backlog outlining the problem space.
2. Prioritize the Scenario Backlog and agree on scope.
3. Combine the top scenarios into coherent overarching Orientation Scenarios.

Let the agile teams focus on their parts…

With GraphQL a modern and flexible way of providing APIs for our data is emerging.
The clients specify which data they need, the provisioning of data becomes more flexible and dynamic. Over-fetching or under-fetching are history.
But does this mean we have to rewrite all APIs to benefit? How can we retrofit a GraphQL API onto our existing API landscape?
We will explore three different approaches.

Target Audience: Architects, Developers
Prerequisites: Basic knowledge in API design and Java
Level:…

The cloud has fundamentally changed how we design applications and introduced whole new categories of software-development disasters. With a focus on Java, this talk will introduce some of the new tools, patterns, and best practices for modern distributed application development. It also gives a tour of some of the most painful anti-patterns Holly has seen as a cloud consultant.

Target Audience: Architects, Developers, Strategic Decision Makers
Prerequisites: Basic experience of cloud computing,…

As Product Leaders, the methods we use are fairly easy to understand but the collaboration with others to get to the desired results sometimes is a hard nut to crack in a complex software engineering world. This talk will provide insights in solution-focused coaching skills being used in the product role and break the common belief that coaching is only relevant for Agile Coaches. It will show how solution-focused coaching skills have been used to solve several challenges on individual, team and…

Over 95 % of companies in the EU are small businesses with less than 250 employees. Many of them would like to reduce their carbon emissions but very few have the knowledge and time needed to take action.
Reaching a sizable fraction of these companies with actionable information about their carbon footprint has a huge potential for climate impact. But is that possible for an organization with less than 10 employees? While also working at a sustainable pace?

Target Audience: Everybody willing to…

• The race for performance and the variety of specialized workloads drives the industry to build more parallel, more heterogenous (multi accelerator), and distributed computing systems.  
• These systems introduce programming challenges and barriers of entry to developers.
• Software solutions can make technologies like AI accessible, safer and easier to use by wider communities.
• We will present some of the driving forces, world trends, challenges, and emerging solutions such as oneAPI, AI…

How to structure your program right? This has been a central question since the beginning of software development. Layers are a start, but not enough. Hexagonal, Onion, and Clean Architecture have joined the club together with DDD's Tactical Design and Pattern Languages. Great system design is not achieved with one of these alone. Putting all the ingredients together we can build the Architecture Hamburger – the combination that makes high quality software possible.

Target Audience: Architects,…

Green software engineering is an emerging discipline and being a part of the climate change solution is a relatively new part of many software companies' strategy. For some of us, building resource efficient solutions is something we have already done for a long time, but we called it performance work. Where do the two meet and when are they different? This talk introduces the field of green software engineering and explains where it intersects with performance optimizations, giving you the…

Requirements engineering like testing require balance of value and risk. Agile requirements engineering and testing with test-driven requirements engineering (TDRE) balances project risks and cost. Clear advantage: Requirements are understandable, testable, and directly applicable as test case. Lead time and costs in testing are reduced by up to thirty percent.

This presentation at OOP 2023 will practically introduce to agile requirements engineering and test with TDRE. A case study…

Learn key patterns, practices, tools, and techniques which lead to successful cloud adoption. Lynn's work with research teams around genomic-scale data pipelines for human health will be highlighted in this keynote.

One of the fundamental strategies of Agile Modeling is that artifacts, including architecture models, should be just barely good enough (JBGE). Another way of saying this is your models should be sufficient for the task at hand, no more and no less. But sufficiency is contextual in nature, it depends.
In this session we will look at the issue of model sufficiency, exploring the risk factors that motivate us to model more as well as the conditions that enable us to model less.

Target Audience:…

In 2022, is having a dedicated software architect still useful, or are there better ways to fulfil this role? The answer, as usual, is "it depends”.

Target Audience: Software Developers and Architects
Prerequisites: None
Level: Advanced

Extended Abstract:
Traditional approaches to software architecture usually trigger thoughts of ivory tower dictators who are a long way removed from the process of building software, probably because they no longer write code anymore. This unfortunate stereotype…

We all live in an increasingly complex world and decision making for leaders isn't getting any easier. However, a long time ago, it probably was equally challenging for the Roman Emperor - Philosopher King - Marcus Aurelius. When dealing with our current challenges as leaders (e.g. as product owners, scrum masters or in management), we can learn from ancient Stoic ideas that we are in control of our own decisions, but we cannot control outcome. This interactive session will leave you with focus…

You've heard about this new feature in C++20, Coroutines, but it's the first time you have encountered this term? Then this talk is what you're looking for. We start from the beginning with just "normal" functions. Next, we introduce Coroutines. Using them, we explore the various customization points C++ offers. Another distinction we make is cooperative and preemptive multitasking, opening the door for another beauty of Coroutines, why we don't need locks.
By the end of this talk, you've…

Change happens one person at a time. As a leader, you are responsible for helping to persuade people to accept the change. Many of us have been taught persuasion techniques that focus on giving information … and then more information. How is this working for you? Might there be a better way? This session will give you the opportunity to prepare other methods of persuasion for the changes you want to make.

Target Audience: Anyone who sees problems in their organization and would like to help make…

Sustainability needs change-ability. This 90-min panel will have on three speakers on change. How to move many people or a company to change the status quo. This question addresses the needs of organizations and likewise the needs of our society.

Target Audience: Change Management People, Everyone
Prerequisites: None
Level: Advanced

Extended Abstract:
We will combine three speakers with 20 min Impulse talks. There will be biological brewed beer in different flavors to accompany the tasteful and…

In a microservices architecture, services shall be as loosely coupled as possible. Still, they need to communicate with each other in order to fulfill business requirements. This talk will help you shape an answer for the typical questions (like shall I be synchronous or asynchronous and what's a good protocol to use?). You will better understand not only the architectural implications but also the effect on the productivity of your teams.

Target Audience: Developers, Architects
Prerequisites:…

This interactive workshop presents a practical approach for scaling agile. The approach is based on five shifts needed in typical organisations to get agile to work well at scale. It guides how to find the right balance for each shift, using the current context of the organisation. In this way it not only presents the end state, but also the possible steps to implement each shift.

In this practical workshop participants will learn to assess their own organisation against the five shifts.

Target…

As developers, our job is to deliver working software. With the shift to CI/CD and the move to the cloud, the need to have the right feedback at the right time only increases. There are many ways that testing can help us with that. Not only can testing help us verify our solution and prevent us from breaking things, it can also help us design our software, find flaws in our architecture and come up with better solutions. In this talk I will highlight some of the many ways that testing can help…

In this session I’ll examine some of the things that can go wrong when organisations jump headfirst into micro-service architectures without understanding the potential pitfalls.

I'll explain contract testing from the ground up. You'll learn how it can decouple micro-service dependencies during development, allowing your teams to work effectively. And I'll describe sophisticated, free, open-source tooling that helps integrate contract testing into your software lifecycle, giving you the…

Unfortunately, this presentation has to be cancelled at short notice for personal reasons.

This talk covers the fundamentals of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), including key definitions and statistics. Moreover, the link between DEI, sustainability, and innovation will be made, including reflections on the importance but also complexity of finding a balance.

As part of this talk, I will link theory and research to my work as the Global Head of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in a…

You know the story, one dev in the team found out about this amazing new framework which will solve potentially aaaall your problems; but the product owner stops him right away. There is definitely no time until the next roadmap milestone is reached and you’re already late. We have introduced the tool Tech Radar – in two different organisational setups – to make technology strategy explicit.

In this talk I’ll share our learnings on how we made sure our teams don’t drown in legacy, train them on…

Java applications are widely used and often several years old. You can use these applications in the cloud via lift-and-shift (helps nothing) or you can rewrite the application in cloud-native style and use the advantages of the cloud.

An alternative for existing applications is missing here. It must be possible to go to the cloud and use advantages such as serverless and scale-to-zero WITHOUT having to rewrite the entire application.
I will show what is already working well today and where the…

Since the dawn of software development, programmers have been perpetually occupied with migrating our "legacy" code to "the new platform". As soon as we finish, it is obsolete, and we need to start over. Today we are typically in the midst of moving to the cloud. We need DevOps, microservices, new frontend frameworks ... there is always some new tool that promises to deliver much better value than our existing solutions. Millions - even billions - are spent on these initiatives. Are they worth…

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its sub-domain, Machine Learning (ML), have been developing quickly. Your organization could be planning for or be in the middle of an AI transformation.

In this talk, I will speak from my own experience managing the strategy and delivery for AI/ML programs and discuss practical steps for the executive leadership to ensure the success of their AI strategy and delivery.

Target Audience: Project Leaders, IT Leaders, Executives, Decision Makers
Prerequisites: None
…

You have emotions? Congrats, you are a (professional) human being! Now, how can you actually handle your emotions smartly in our still tech- & tool-focused IT world?

In professional situations like:
- dealing with human "legacy experiences"
- integrating "personal silos"
- interacting with ease with other human beings
- tackling stressful situations (e.g. conflicts) within a team

This session offers a set of science-based, pragmatic tools that are (almost) always accessible - like a Swiss…

Sustainability has become a huge topic. And software is eating the world. As a consequence, we are responsible for the growing ecological impact of the solutions we create.

In this session, we will discuss several sustainability patterns, ranging from the infrastructure level over design and development to requirements and processes that support us in reducing our carbon footprint - including trade-offs and tips for implementation.

After this session you will have a little toolbox for creating…

As tiny robots become individually more sophisticated, and larger robots easier to mass produce, a breakdown of conventional disciplinary silos is enabling swarm engineering to be adopted across scales and applications, from nanomedicine to treat cancer, to cm-sized robots for large-scale environmental monitoring or intralogistics. This convergence of capabilities is facilitating the transfer of lessons learned from one scale to the other. Larger robots that work in the 1000s may operate in a…

Software Development based on a distributed architecture provides both several advantages and new challenges. In order to take advantage of the distribution it requires implementation of service discovery, routing, load-balancing, resilience mechanisms and more. These requirements can be covered by language frameworks or the underlying platform.

This talk will walk through a comparison of various approaches with focus on frameworks, Kubernetes and extending options like Service Meshes and eBPF.…

What should you do if you are promoted or hired to be the first Head of Architecture in a big, international organisation? What should you do to shape the role to deliver value to the organisation and its customers? How do you work with many development teams to shape the current legacy spaghetti mess into a coherent system, without becoming a bottleneck?

In this talk I'll respond to all questions and more, by sharing my experience in becoming the first Head of Architecture in a big…

When you want to make a change, the skeptics are lying in wait throughout the process. You must continually recognize them if you want the change to be sustainable. Who are they and why are they resisting?

We want to be understanding but oh, they can be annoying. We are told to increase communication, but before shouting more information, we must understand why they are irritating us.

This presentation will provide some practical tips for identifying and dealing with resistance in your…

Climate action and green software engineering has risen to the top of many technology companies' agenda. With accuracy hungry algorithms ML software is consuming more and more computational resources, largely benefiting from the increasingly better hardware. Are the results worth the environmental cost?

This talk introduces the field of green software engineering, showing options to estimate the carbon footprint and discuss ideas on how to make Machine Learning greener, giving you the tools to…

When building systems, it can be too easy to focus on features and overlook software qualities related to architecture. If not enough attention is given to qualities related to the architecture, technical debt and design problems can creep in until it becomes muddy with the effect of teams being less agile. Sustainable architecture requires ongoing attention, especially when there are evolving priorities, technical risks, and many dependencies. This talk presents practices for creating and…

Language defines the boundary to our world: it sets what we can describe and what we can’t. This talk describes how to formalize a ubiquitous language into a domain-specific language. The resulting language is used for communication and collaboration as well as used as a basis for generating code, tests, configs, etc. The talk is based on industry cases from various domains, such as banking and insurance, industry automation and automotive.

Target Audience: Developers, Subject Matter/Domain…

Sustainability is an emerging concern in software. However, advances in software technology over the past years appear to be in conflict with this goal. Data centers promise virtually unlimited compute power and consume a lot of energy. DevOps and modern programming demand high resource utilization. Are we on a wrong path? Must we return to highly optimized assembler code? Or can we achieve sustainability by consciously balancing the advantages of modern software engineering with the proven…