Paving the Road to Effective Software Development

Explore effective software development strategies in this conference talk from YOW! 2022. Learn about autonomous cross-functional teams, platform engineering, and the concept of a "paved road" for balancing team autonomy with organizational needs. Discover how to enable faster delivery of business value through loosely coupled architectures, empowered teams, and well-designed platforms. Gain insights on building and managing platforms that provide essential services while maintaining security, quality, and cost control. Understand the principles for creating effective paved roads, including building what people need, reducing adoption risks, minimizing wait times, and allowing for customization. Examine real-world examples from the Financial Times and learn how to handle challenges like the log4shell vulnerability. Acquire valuable knowledge on fostering innovation while maintaining necessary guardrails in modern software development environments.

Intro
Loosely coupled architectures
Empowered teams
Autonomy
Paving the road
Our path to the paved road
Mandatory platform
Financial Times platform
Minimal platform
Guardrails
Paved road
Principles for building paved roads
Build what people need
Reduce the risk of adopting it
Don't make people wait
Make things easy to use
Allow people to extend & adapt
Help people do the right thing
Going off road
log4shell
Wrapping up
Principles for building the paved road
Outro