JetBrains Technology Day for Java – Software Modernisation

Helen Scott

On July 10, 2020, JetBrains hosted a Technology Day for Java. We had 10 presentations and the videos for them are available here. Over the coming weeks, in no particular order, we’d like to share with you the extra resources that our speakers kindly provided and links to further reading or code samples.

We hosted Sandro Mancuso talking to us about software modernization.

Many organizations rely on strategic systems that are becoming harder and harder to maintain. This could mean:

• The company is unhappy because features are taking longer to build, and they cannot react fast enough to market demands.
• Developers are unhappy because the code is messy and negatively affects their productivity.
• Testers are unhappy because of the volume of work they have and because they still cannot guarantee the quality of the software.
• Clients are becoming disenchanted because of the lack of quality and low frequency of updates.

Strategic software cannot become a burden to the organization – they need to remain strategic and continuously enable business agility. Sandro’s presentation contained a wealth of valuable insights for the end to end journey from common drivers through to strategic stakeholder alignment.

Sandro also spoke about common impediments (there’s a lot of them!) as well as the principles of software modernization that businesses could use as a guide on their journey to ensure business value.

We liked this presentation because it’s a step back from what we normally talk about – instead learning about improvements at the code level, we learned about how to see things from an organizational level. So often as developers we see new technologies, new patterns, new versions of Java that we think will make our lives and our applications better, but making these updates is not prioritized by "the business". Sandro talked about the things that developers can learn in order to sell "the business" (your team leads, the business owners, or maybe someone else) on the value of making the changes we want to see.

Further resources

• https://codurance.com/

What our audience thought of Sandro’s presentation

@sandromancuso kicking off delivering his talk on “Software Modernization” to the global @jetbrains audience. Thanks for the opportunity @trisha_gee https://t.co/nKqq80782v #softwaremodernisation #JBTechDayforJava #JetBrainsLovesJava @codurance pic.twitter.com/7TtL4lh43r

— Natalie Gray (@natjgray) July 10, 2020

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