Presentation: "Keynote - Simplicity in Design"

Time: Monday 17:30 - 18:30

Location: Bayside 204

Abstract: The problems we are looking to solve with software are becoming increasingly harder and more complex, but how do we best deal with this complexity? Martin and Erik will argue that the answer is simplicity. More than twenty years ago Fred Brooks identified accidential complexity, that is complexity that is not inherent in the problem but is caused by the approach we have chosen, as the only area left where significant gains in productivity could be made. So, if we manage to achieve simplicty in design and approach we can successfully tackle the real complexity of the problem we are solving. What we have seen, though, is that it is anything but easy to achieve simplicity. All too often we end up with designs that are either too simplistic or too complicated. The real skill in designing software lies in finding a good middle ground.

Erik Dörnenburg, ThoughtWorks

Erik Dörnenburg

Erik Dörnenburg is an application architect and developer at ThoughtWorks Inc., where he is helping clients with the design and implementation of large-scale enterprise solutions. Building on his experience with J2EE, Microsoft .NET and other environments, Erik is continually exploring new patterns of enterprise software.

Before joining ThoughtWorks Erik was Technical Director at Pixelpark UK, a new media company, where he integrated enterprise systems with web-based solutions and a variety of digital delivery channels. His career in enterprise software began in the early nineties on the NeXTSTEP platform and Erik has been an advocate of agile, test-driven, object-oriented development and Open Source software for many years. He holds a degree in Informatics from the University of Dortmund and has studied Computer Science and Linguistics at the University College Dublin.

Martin Fowler, ThoughtWorks

Martin Fowler

Martin Fowler is an author, speaker, consultant and general loud-mouth on software development.

He concentrates on designing enterprise software - looking at what makes a good design and what practices are needed to come up with good design. He has pioneered object-oriented technology, refactoring, patterns, agile methodologies, domain modeling, the Unified Modeling Language (UML), and Extreme Programming.

He's the Chief Scientist at ThoughtWorks - an international application development company, and has written five books on software development: Analysis Patterns, UML Distilled (now in its 3rd edition), Refactoring, Planning Extreme Programming (with Kent Beck), and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. I also write articles regularly on my site at Martin Fowler.