Big Bangs, Monorails, and Microservices: Software Development Lessons from the Golden Age of The Simpsons.

Abstract:

Only a few things are certain in life: death, taxes, and the fact most software projects will go over-budget, underperform, or worse-yet fail altogether.

With decades of books, conferences, and materials written on the subject, we continue repeating the same fundamental mistakes that lead to these failures — and we still end-up with massive cost overruns or worse still: complete write-offs with nothing to show.

Come take a journey back in time to 1990’s Springfield to get some insights on avoiding these costly mistakes, and to help shed light on why failures like healthgov.org or canada.ca continue happening.

We’ll look on how to pragmatically deal with our obsession with shiny objects, our wishful thinking tendencies, our self-interest with Resume-Driven Design, and a slew of other and often non-technical anti-patterns —in order to help mitigate them, and a more efficient Springfield.

About the speaker:

Victor Szoltysek is metaphorical emergency software firefighter. He has a long history of software consulting and effectively putting-out-fires around corporate America including for ThoughtWorks and Pivotal.

He is often dropped-in during serious project difficulties and cost-overruns.

He has been able to successfully turn around some projects, seen others fail miserably, and, regrettably, has personally witnessed close to one billion dollars in project write-offs. That’s billion with a B!

Throughout his career and dozens of post-mortem analyses, he’s acquired a very specific set of skills, including a keen premonition of project failures before they happen, and insights to how they could easily have been avoided.