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Wed, April 28Architecture & Distributed SystemsAI-Assisted Software Engineering
“Big design up front is dumb. Doing no design up front is even dumber.” This captures the journey from big design up front in the 20th century to emergent design and evolutionary architecture today. In the push to become agile, many teams have abandoned architectural thinking, up-front design, documentation, diagramming, and modelling, often in reaction to the heavy processes of the past or through a misinterpretation of the Agile Manifesto. The current focus on AI has further exaggerated this problem.
In this keynote, you will explore why software design activities can become too high-level and superficial, leaving teams with ambiguous whiteboard sketches or AI-generated architecture diagrams that make solutions difficult to communicate, assess, and review. You will examine a different approach to up-front design: creating a sufficient starting point rather than a perfect end-state. You will also explore how this can help avoid costly rework and refactoring, enable teams to scale and move faster, and consider whether AI improves or worsens the way we design software.
What You Will Learn
Why architectural thinking, up-front design, documentation, diagramming, and modelling still matter
How sufficient up-front design can help teams avoid costly rework and refactoring
How AI affects the way teams approach and communicate software design
Who Should Attend
Software Developers, Software Architects, Technical Leads, Staff and Principal Engineers, Engineering Managers, and practitioners involved in designing and evolving software systems.
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Simon is the creator of the C4 model for visualising software architecture and Structurizr - the original developer-friendly "models as code" tooling for creating version-controlled software architecture diagrams based upon the C4 model. He is the author of "The C4 Model" (O'Reilly) and “Software Architecture for Developers” (Leanpub). Simon has worked with hundreds of organisations across ~40 countries, from startups to global household names in almost every industry sector, helping teams adopt the C4 model and communicate their software architecture more effectively.
