Innovation Enabled Value Driven Software Evolution • Dave Thomas • CodeCrafts 2024

This presentation was recorded at Code Crafts 2024
https://code-crafts.com/

In this talk, we describe our experience applying unconventional technical innovation techniques to make significant impacts in challenging environments. Unlike the generally accepted approach of slowly evolving the old system to the following generic technology and practices, e.g. Procedural to OO, OO to FP, Waterfall to Agile, Monolith to Microservices, etc., we describe an alternative we will call Legacy Innovation. We explain and illustrate by concrete examples a lean value-based approach to target and implement short-term high-impact changes at specific value opportunities in the architecture.

Experience with legacy transformation is well known to be expensive, slow, and high-risk, too often with disappointing impact. This isn’t surprising because the Agile approach seeks to improve primarily through systemic change, often force-fitting standard work practices and engineering techniques across the business.  Although Lean inspired Agile, Agile has unfortunately been obsessed with specific ceremonies and tooling.   Despite over two decades of Agile, most large organizations still apply the same techniques! Executives often sign up for agile transformations to obtain ****agility and productivity, whereas the promise of Agile is improved predictability and quality***.*  In our experience, significant single-approach transformations are problematic.  **** While they may be “agile in the small,” they don't deliver the impact businesses need.

In contrast to common code-centric approaches for large-scale transformation, we discuss our experiences applying a *value-based approach*, where Agility is substantially due to using a specific innovation at a *focused point of high leverage*. To my knowledge, the innovation approach is not discussed in the legacy literature, which focuses on evolving large code bases by  "*Working with Legacy Code*."

A carefully targeted approach allows more effective use of scarce skilled resources, substantially reducing training and staff expenses.  Agility and Productivity typically come from significant innovations in the value chain. Unlike code-centric approaches, we focus on *data and data flow*. Each intervention applies a different, robust and *strong specific solution*, often using new or radically different engineering approaches for each improvement.

In our experience, the shortest path to accelerate delivery is to selectively insert appropriate innovations in the value chain. To make this talk very tangible, we focus on several concrete case studies that illustrate what one might call *innovation patterns*applied in practice.


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