Architecture Health & Fitness Night – From Debt to Durable Systems
Details
Hello everybody,
Let’s start the new year with two great talks on how we can avoid falling into the legacy debt trap …
Agenda
🕡 17:30 - Doors open
🕕 18:00 – Intro & First Talk 🗣️- Tracking Health over Debt: Strategies to keep a Microservice Architecture Healthy
🕢 18:50 – Break
🕖 19:00 – Second Talk 🗣️ - Architectural Fitness in Practice: Defining & Measuring your architecture goals with fitness functions
🕗 19:50 – 🎉 Open-end with 🍕&🍻
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🗣️ First Talk - Tracking Health over Debt: Strategies to keep a Microservice Architecture Healthy
For a long time kununu focused on fixing what’s broken - a Big Ball of Mud Monolith - and how to move away from it. As we enter the last phase of what has been a multi-year migration, we are shifting from focusing on what's broken into maintaining what’s healthy (Known as tracking health over debt).
Expect an inside view into kununu’s practices that maintain a healthy system. Learn how we define what healthy means through testable System Quality Requirements, how we ensure that we learn from incidents long term, and how regular domain health checks help teams prioritise what’s important.
Whether you're stuck in tech debt discussions or looking for a more proactive approach to system quality, join us for practical lessons from our journey.
Angela Rumpl is a Solution Architect at kununu, the leading employer review platform in the DACH region. With 20 years of experience in software engineering, a strong background in backend development, and extensive leadership experience, she now leads the Architecture Council supporting approximately 80 engineers across 9 cross-functional teams. She drives cross-organisational strategic initiatives such as kununu's migration from monolith to microservices. Her approach emphasises architecture facilitation over gatekeeping – empowering teams through collaborative processes such as modeling workshops, Advice Forums & ADRs for decision making. Angela is a co-organiser of the DDD & MRDS meetup in Vienna and contributes to organising ComoCamp.
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🗣️ Second Talk - Architectural Fitness in Practice: Defining & Measuring your architecture goals with fitness functions
Modern software architecture needs measurable guardrails instead of PowerPoint wishful thinking. In this talk, I’ll show how to use fitness functions as a systematic approach to derive the right metrics for you to turn architecture goals into something concrete and verifiable.
I'll show you my pragmatic catalog of building blocks you can use and combine to design your own fitness functions and why these are the most important dimensions to consider in practice.
On this basis, I’ll introduce a fitness function testing pyramid, walk through concrete examples of useful checks and metrics, and demonstrate how to deliberately use generative AI as an architecture assistant – from generating ideas for fitness functions and target metrics to helping you shape your ideas into concrete metrics to verify.
Rene Weiss is an independent software and enterprise architect, consultant, and coach based in Vienna. He lives the “Architecture Elevator”: from the boardroom down to the code, he works with top management on transformation programs as well as with development teams on concrete architectures, fitness functions, and effective ways of working.
For more than 20 years, Rene has supported agile software development projects and has been a regular conference speaker on evolutionary architectures, measurable architecture goals, and pragmatic software engineering practices.
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🏢 Location sponsor
The location, food, and drinks are sponsored by kununu (https://www.kununu.com/). kununu is the leading employer review and workplace insights platform in the DACH region, empowering employees to share authentic workplace experiences and helping job seekers make informed career decisions. With millions of reviews and salary insights, kununu creates transparency in the job market while helping companies build stronger employer brands. Sounds interesting? Check out their open positions.