Alexander von Zitzewitz: Maintaining Technical Quality of Software - It's the Architecture, Stupid !

When: October 11, 2011

Most non-trivial software systems suffer from severe technical and structural debt. This burden acts like an ever increasing tax on every code change or new feature to be added. The cost of change is growing significantly faster than the code base. Although this is more and more a known fact, very little is done to address this problem in a meaningful way. Shouldn't one assume that project managers and stake holders would do everything in their power to fight structural and technical debt to keep the system maintainable and the cost of change manageable?

The session elaborates why this problem is so difficult to solve and identifies potential solutions with a high return on investment. As the title indicates, software architecture has a very important influence on the overall maintainability and technical quality of a software system. During a recent informal poll at the New England Java User Group 80% of the attendees agreed, that architecture is the most important long term success factor for a software system, while only 1% had a process in place to monitor and maintain architectural quality rules.

About Alexander von Zitzewitz

Alexander v. Zitzewitz is founder and managing director of hello2morrow and CEO of the US subsidiary. He has more than 20 years of experience in the field of software architecture and development best practices. His areas of expertise are object oriented system design and large scale system architecture. Alexander has a masters degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Munich.