The Lost Art of Software plan • Simon Brown • Devoxx Poland 2022

“Big plan up front is dumb. Doing no plan up front is even dumber.” This quote epitomises what I’ve seen during our journey from “big plan up front” in the 20th century, to “emergent design” and “evolutionary architecture” in the 21st. In their desire to become “agile”, many teams seem to have abandoned architectural thinking, up front design, documentation, diagramming, and modelling. In many cases this is simply a knee-jerk reaction to the dense bloated processes of times past, and in others it’s a misinterpretation and misapplication of the agile manifesto. As a result, many of the software plan activities I witness these days are very high-level and superficial in nature. The resulting output, typically an ad hoc sketch on a whiteboard, is usually ambiguous and open to interpretation, leading to a situation where the underlying solution can’t be communicated, assessed, or reviewed. If you’re willing to consider that up front plan is about creating a adequate starting point, alternatively than creating a perfect end-state, you shortly realise that a large amount of the costly rework and “refactoring” seen on many software improvement teams can be avoided. Join me for a discussion about the lost art of software design, and how we can reintroduce it to aid teams scale and decision faster.

Lecture took place on Thursday 23rd June 2022 at 16:00 in area 1

Simon is an independent consultant specialising in software architecture, and the author of “Software Architecture for Developers” (a developer-friendly guide to software architecture, method leadership and the balance with agility). He is besides the creator of the C4 model for visualising software architecture, and the founder of Structurizr. Simon is simply a regular talker at global software improvement conferences, and travels the planet to aid organisations visualise and paper their software architecture.

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