Every system has an architecture, whether accidental or intentional, and regardless of whether it was put in place by a nominated architect or whether it emerged from the decisions and discussions of a team. All too often the focus of what is often described as architecture is centred around a specific set of platform technologies, which forms only one part of the set of concerns an architecture should. And all too often architecture is seen as a separate concern from development process, whereas the two are intertwined — what you build is influenced by how you build it, and vice versa.

This course looks at the relationship between Agile processes and good architecture, taking in development process models, architectural styles, requirements techniques, sufficient modelling techniques, design patterns and testing practices. This course includes a number of practical exercises so that attendees can see how the different activities fit together.

Software Craftsmanship is at the heart of this course. Throughout, you will learn about the Software Craftsmanship attitude to development and how to apply it to your workplace.

In this training, we will address what evolutionary design is, and will delve into principles and practices that can help realize an effective evolutionary design.

Most of us have been working with some kind of legacy systems with lots of technical debt. How do we improve the codebase without The Big Rewrite and avoid creating yet another spaghetti monster? That’s what this workshop is about.

In this workshop, we will work together on a legacy system. We will approach the problem by creating a new, clean, and truly object-oriented model with modularity, cohesion, and testability in mind. We will introduce the model into the existing application in a secure manner, leaving ourselves an option to withdraw changes at any point in time. Fully automated tests will make sure that both models produce consistent results. EventStorming will help us set priorities right and understand the business impact of our changes.

Finally, we’ll get a solid, clean, and object-oriented code aligned with the company's goals and agile software development best practices.

This workshops uses Java as a reference language; if your primary language is not Java – you're still very welcome, as we'll be working in pairs.

NEW in 2021: How should one handle vague/unclear/huge projects? How to get into individual brainstorming mode and think unthinkable?

NEW in 2021: Distinguishing between good and bad procrastination and the practical session of group de-procrastination.

The workshop is led by David Neal; David is #1 speaker of 2019.

This workshop covers fundamental concepts, relevant to all programming platforms and languages; developers and architects with different backgrounds can attend.