45 mins speech

What Dev-n-Ops can learn from a Tamagotchi

Michele Danieli, Architecture & Technology Director, Objectway Group

Alessandro Scavino, Software Developer, Objectway Group

While innovation, new technologies and paradigms play an important role in our work as engineers, both on the application and platform side, the way our software grows, mature and behaves is a critical part. Nevertheless, it is an aspect that is often less cared for by many. Many factors contribute to being perceived as less important: customer pressure for new features on development, less budget on non-functional aspects, organization culture and silos and a good level of misunderstanding on the real cost of running code, when considering obsolescence and attritions for example. The Japanese game Tamagotchi pressed its young players to care for the creature through its growth or let it die; similarly, we need to play attention to how our software grows from its inception to maturity and beyond. This is often the goal of an iterative and continuous work in improving the maturity of the software and our practices. In this talk we share our reflections on how we can make operational aspects important in our practices, leading to what we consider Technical Excellence.