Dan North, Principal consultant with ThoughtWorks, agile and lean methods

Dan is a principal consultant with ThoughtWorks, where he writes software and coaches teams in agile and lean methods. He believes in putting people first and writing simple, pragmatic software. He believes that most problems that teams face are about communication, and all the others are too. This is why he puts so much emphasis on "getting the words right", and why he is so passionate about behaviour-driven development, communication and how people learn. He has been working in the IT industry since he graduated in 1991, and he occasionally blogs at dannorth.net.

Presentation: "Adventures of an Agile Architect"

Track: Architecture for the Architect

Time: Wednesday 13:45 - 14:45

Location: Stanford

Abstract:

I didn't ask for this mess - it was here when I moved in. You can see where the previous tenants have botched one job after another. Amateurs every one of them! The place isn't even structurally sound, and you can see the layers of old wallpaper where they have "decorated". Three of the rooms have almost the same stuff in them and there's one door that doesn't even lead anywhere. The services are coupled to the clients, the database schema has leaked out and left a nasty stain all over the UI, and the noise and smell from the deployment process is just unbearable.

The trouble is, my landlord is (understandably) reluctant to let me burn it all down and start over. It's too risky, too expensive, and besides there are lots of other people living here and we can't move them all out during the renovations. Oh, and the builders say they can't work together.

So, join me as I try to rearchitect my house from top to bottom within all these constraints - whilst trying to keep the noise down and not disturb the neighbours. It can't break any downstream dependencies, and we don't want any down time or regression defects when you go into production.