A major point of contention between IT departments and their business counterparts, be they internal users or product managers, is the lack of responsiveness to change in IT systems. How these systems got to this condition is one question, but this talk addresses the issue of how to change the situation.
Making a system maintainable requires new tools and processes. This talk will describe the various techniques – such as continuous design, continuous delivery and evolutionary architecture – that transform a system to one that can be readily enhanced and provide the warning mechanisms that prevent inadvertent drift back into the mud.
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Dr. Rebecca Parsons
@rebeccaparsons
is ThoughtWorks' Chief Technology Officer. She has more than 30 years' application development experience, in industries ranging from telecommunications to emergent internet services. She has extensive experience leading in the creation of large-scale distributed object applications, services based applications, and the integration of disparate systems. Before coming to ThoughtWorks she worked as an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida. She also worked as Director's Post Doctoral Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory researching issues in parallel and distributed computation, genetic algorithms, computational biology and non-linear dynamical systems. She spent her sabbatical from ThoughtWorks working with UNICEF's Innovation Lab in Kampala, Uganda in 2010. Rebecca received a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Economics from Bradley University, a Masters of Science in Computer Science from Rice University and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University.