Chief Scientist Martin Fowler, Loud-mouth on Object Design

Martin Fowler is an author, speaker, consultant and general loud-mouth on software development.

He concentrates on designing enterprise software - looking at what makes a good design and what practices are needed to come up with good design. He has pioneered object-oriented technology, refactoring, patterns, agile methodologies, domain modeling, the Unified Modeling Language (UML), and Extreme Programming.

He's the Chief Scientist at ThoughtWorks - an international application development company, and has written five books on software development: Analysis Patterns, UML Distilled (now in its 3rd edition), Refactoring, Planning Extreme Programming (with Kent Beck), and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. I also write articles regularly on my site at Martin Fowler.

Presentation: "Introduction: IT - more than tools and technology"

Track: IT - more than tools and technology

Time: Thursday 10:20 - 10:30

Location: Wordsworth Room

Presentation: "What are we programming for?"

Track: IT - more than tools and technology

Time: Thursday 10:30 - 11:30

Location: Wordsworth Room

Abstract:

A large part of the thinking of the software profession is that we are hired guns - we do whatever our customers want, and don't reflect too much on the consequences of that. This ignores the fact that software has had a profound impact on human society in the last few decades and us in the software profession do have an ability to influence the direction of that impact. To do this we need to engage with the consequences of our work, both for the enterprises that hire us and the broader human society. We also need to reflect upon the nature of our profession for its structure and composition affects this engagement. This is not an easy topic to talk about, which is partly why I think we avoid it. But we should not let its difficulty stop us from the reflection and conversation that can lead to effective action.