[June Event] Two Talks: Krisztina and Chris

A big thank you to our sponsors numi for arranging this event. numi are a trusted talent and hiring partner to DDD London, and specialise in helping companies with growth across technology. If you're looking to hire experts in DDD, or looking for a new job in an environment where DDD is adopted, please speak to one of the numi team.

A second thank you to Mastercard, who have kindly agreed to host the event on the evening at their amazing offices. More to come on the evening regarding Mastercard's current technology landscape.

[Krisztina's Talk] Shifting from Projects to Feedback-Based Product Development: Practical Tips and Insights
As software continues to dominate the business landscape, there is a growing need for better digital products built with a feedback-based approach. While many organizations think they are agile, interviewing customers and preparing design mockups for weeks, followed by a backlog with the whole plan, for example, is still waterfall development. Most people involved in product development are unaware of how having a project or a product mindset influences the digital solution. They usually blame the developers when the software becomes slow, hard to maintain and error-prone, but the developers can't solve the root cause of these problems.

During the talk, we will focus on identifying signs that your product development process is still waterfall-ish and the best practices for adopting a feedback-based approach. We will delve into how to decide what to build next and how much of it, define milestones, and determine when they are reached, to name a few examples. By doing so, you will leave better equipped to build digital products that are more responsive to customer needs, reduce the risk of failure, and promote innovation.

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Krisztina Hirth has worked as a software engineer for the last 20 years, always looking for the right way to deliver reliable, resilient and expandable value through software, knowledge and empathy. Lately, she has changed roles to help teams and her company PayFit, to understand the benefits of Domain-driven Design and to enjoy discovering models before applying patterns :)
She is convinced that agility is nothing else than feedback-driven development, that DDD and domain modelling reduce the waste of energy, time and future technical debt, and that work must be fun.

[Chris's Talk] Living Ubiquitous Language Documentation with Contextive
"A change in the language is a change in the model"

As you maintain model integrity you may end up with "duplicate concepts" or "false cognates".

Is everyone coding or are they coding? (Are you a doctor or a software developer)? Does a spoiler make you happy or sad (Are you a car enthusiast or a film lover?)

And how do new team members who weren't part of initial modelling exercises get up to speed on your ubiquitous language?

In this talk we'll explore a new open source tool called Contextive. It's designed for documenting the ubiquitous language and embeds the definitions in all the places the language is used - in code, documentation, online conversations and modelling tools.

It is context aware, so you always get the right definition in the right place.

And since you see the definitions where you're working in the domain, you can update them as soon as you identify need for change or improvements.

We'll explore how to use the tool including best practices, and benefits to be gained for new and old team members in capturing and evolving your language definition as part of your code repository.

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Chris is a Startup CTO Coach helping startups realise their vision and new CTOs flourish in their roles. He also supports executives & boards with strategic technology advice, and engineering teams with training, mentoring and consulting in architecture, quality, domain-driven design and test driven development.

He is a regular meetup & conference speaker and to support teams using Domain-Driven Design, he recently launched https://contextive.tech & co-founded the Domain-Driven Design Australia meetup.