QCon is a practitioner-driven conference designed for technical team leads, architects, and project managers who influence software innovation in their teams.

Presentation: "Decisions, decisions"

Track: Architecture Evolution and Improvement / Time: Wednesday 16:40 - 17:40 / Location: Mountbatten Room

Architecture isn't just the static "shape" of your software. It's the set of decisions that define it, enabling — or inhibiting — change, evolution and improvement over time. It is also the decisions about how you verify, deploy, version, manage and monitor an application. Each of these decisions is a trade-off: there are no Best Practises. Some decisions can have a huge forward impact, and it isn't always obvious which ones!

In this talk Dan offers several of his Patterns of Effective Delivery as strategies to help you improve your architecture decision-making. He won't tell you whether to prefer stability or uncertainty, DRYness or coupling, latency or throughput, manual or automated testing. That's up to you. But he might help you go into those decisions with your eyes open.

Download slides

Dan North, Agile troublemaker, developer, originator of BDD

Dan North

Biography: Dan North

Dan 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.