Better Software West 2018 - Architecture & Design

Is your industry being disrupted? Is it getting more difficult to keep your customers—or to find new ones? Agile and DevOps form the foundation of best practices for how to build products, but they work just as well when applied to the right—or to the wrong— products. We need a different process to help us distinguish between the two. Lean Startup drives to the source of the problem and helps us answer the question—Should we build it? This year more than half of the participants at Lean Startup Week were from enterprise organizations. If you’re not using the Lean Startup way of designing...

Server-side monoliths—single programs that provide all back-end services—just don't work. They are hard to build, impossible to maintain, and gradually accrete so much baggage that forward development slows to a crawl. Agile development is impossible over this sort of system. Allen Holub says that microservices—systems of small, cooperating server-side agents—solve these problems. However, building a microservice system is not easy, and doing it wrong is disastrous. Taking a deep dive into practical microservice architecture and implementation, Allen covers a lot of practical details to...

If you don't know how to measure what you want, you'll end up wanting what you can measure. The thing you want to know often isn't easily quantifiable, yet measuring the wrong things is worse than nothing—a toxic metric can damage your teams' performance. But with the right data, you can change the conversation. Step away from dangerous metrics that punish unfairly and are easily gamed. Instead, choose effective metrics that get everyone on the same page about what's important and communicate your team's authentic story to management, your customers, and beyond. Join Cheryl Hammond to...