Socio-Technical Modeling for Software Teams, November 4 2019

Our industry has made quite a bit of progress with regard to process and organization design, but they are still areas of active development. SAFe, LeSS, and the Spotify Model are all players in the field along with various contributions from Lean, DevOps and the CI/CD community. Most of these are solutions or frameworks, rather than attempts to represent and assess the dynamics of systems that contain both artifacts(code) and people.

In this workshop, Michael Feathers will start with a very expansive view of Conway’s Law and use it to probe the interactions between team and code in various scenarios. We’ll explore micro service partitioning, component vs. feature teams, the role of QA and the split between front end and backend development, not with the goal of finding the “right” structure for all organizations, but rather in the spirit of being able to anticipate the consequences of various process and organizational structures, where they are contextually appropriate, and how to modify them in tandem with architecture. The goal is to develop enough awareness around the forces of software development to be able to design team structure, process and architecture for particular contexts.

This one-day workshop is appropriate for experienced architects and developers. It will consist of lecture, exercises, and highly interactive discussion.