February 2015: Tom Akehurst - Surviving SOA: Delivering (somewhat) continuously

We will hear from Tom Akehurst (@TomAkehurst) who will give us an experience report of a real-world software delivery situation.

'Surviving SOA: Delivering (somewhat) continuously on a hostile planet'

Summary: I recently worked on a project to rescue a UI app that sits on top of a large, big vendor SOAP-based services stack. The programme is staffed by large numbers of people from multiple companies working in functional silos, there's a chronic lack of usable environments and the system is heavily loaded with incidental complexity and tech debt. In spite of these obstacles we still wanted to be able to develop and test in small iterations, releasing and gaining feedback regularly. I'll talk about some of the things we did to try and make this possible, and about what worked well and what didn't.