devopsdays Amsterdam 2024

Escaping Legacy
2024-06-19 , Studio

Escaping legacy is hard. You have a product in the hands of users, but delivery gets slow, defects are common, and when you want to build a new feature no one can say how long it’s going to take. Engineering is talking about a rewrite, but you can’t just stop and wait.

In this workshop I show how you, as product owner, QA, manager, or engineering lead, can use familiar practices, like Story Mapping and Example Mapping to improve testing, plan refactoring, or even re-work, iteratively and safely.

Assuming a legacy system, in this workshop we start with an existing app and reverse engineer it:
* discover what the functionality is,
* capture it in tests, whether low resolution, or high resolution, and
* prioritize to integrate with our plans for new work and risk

In the workshop you will go through discovery of a familiar existing app, and practice using Story Mapping and Example Mapping to bring the app under test. You work in small groups through the exercises, and can experience how this generates insight and translates into both a solid test strategy, as well as the freedom to be able plan work on a legacy system again.

Wouter Lagerweij is an independent coach who covers the whole spectrum: from the technical practices of Dev and Ops, through process and organization all the way to business and product. He’s also the author of the upcoming book: “A Product Owner’s Guide To Escaping Legacy: How to get back in control and start delivering again”

He loves spending time with teams and organizations, from small startups to large enterprises, to figure out how to improve the way they make software, and make it more fun. To make that happen Wouter uses the knowledge and skills gathered in over twenty years of experience applying Agile processes and practices from XP, Scrum, Kanban, Continuous Delivery, DevOps, Lean and Systems Thinking.

To turn those improvements into real business opportunities, Wouter has added Lean Startup/Lean Enterprise approaches. He's even been known to, occasionally, use common sense.

Suzanne is an independent coach based in the Netherlands. With an interesting background in education, coaching, and running her own tech startup, Suzanne has a diverse view on the needs of people, teams and the whole organization. At her core, She’s driven from a sincere interest in people: always starting from the human to find connection and understanding as the basis of working together.

This speaker also appears in: