Prior to Google, Jeromy was chief architect for the X.commerce business unit at eBay, Inc., where he was the technical lead for the design and development of an open commerce platform, incorporating open source cloud, big data and messaging technologies into a unified offering for merchants and developers. Jeromy has held various positions from senior architect to co-founder to CTO at Yahoo!, Vistaprint, Fidelity Investments, Microsoft, Kinitos, America Online and Quack.com.
Jeromy is a member of the IEEE Software Advisory Board.
Velocity in software development: why do companies slow down and what can we do about it?
The software development community is slowly realizing that maximizing the velocity of delivery is paramount. As Jack Welch said "If you are not moving at the speed of the marketplace, you’re already dead–you just haven’t stopped breathing yet.”
But, it's an unfortunately accepted actuality that the software development and delivery velocity of an organization inexorably decreases over time. This happens not just in the context of a single codebase, which could be explained mostly by straightforward technical phenomena, but in fact across entire teams or companies. In this talk, I'll draw on my experiences with companies from tiny (start-ups I've co-founded) to large (Microsoft, Google) to offer some observations about the reasons behind the apparently unavoidable slowdown that software development teams experience. These reasons range from purely technical - such as the accretion of technical debt - to organizational to legal. But it's not all bad news: I'll also suggest a few concrete techniques that I've seen have a positive impact on velocity in software development.
Reception to follow in DC 1301 (Fishbowl)