In the Brain of Simon Brown: Good Code Isn't Enough September 8, 2010

Writing code is easy. Writing good code is still relatively easy if you know what you're doing. Yet delivering quality software on time and on budget is a whole different story! Some software teams are just happy continuing to work the way that they've always done whereas others will jump on every new process and technology that they can lay their hands on. Successful delivery is a goal that many software teams still strive for but find hard to achieve, often because they are distracted from focussing on what's important.

This session will look at why delivering a successful software project requires more than simply choosing some technology and throwing it together, showing how you can take the best bits from traditional and modern approaches to form a structured yet lightweight approach to software development. The session will cover the complete end-to-end software development process; from planning, gathering requirements and software architecture through to the effective use of source code control, automated unit testing, continuous integration and load testing. Good code isn't enough.

About Simon:

Simon is a hands-on software architect and a senior consultant at C5 Alliance in Jersey. Over the past 12 years, he's been involved in projects ranging from rich desktop clients and web applications through to highly scalable distributed systems and service-oriented architectures; predominantly within the finance industry using Microsoft .NET and Java. He's also undertaken consulting and training roles with a broader focus on people, process and technology.

Simon is also active in wider aspects of the IT industry. Using his architecture experience, he founded the Coding the Architecture website, delivering content for the growing community of hands-on pragmatic software architects. He has also written and co-written a number of books about Java EE web technologies, spoken at a number of high profile software development conferences, developed a software architecture training course and actively maintains a public blog.