I just finished up my talk for this November’s Agile Development Conference and sent it in (I’ll post it here right before the conference). It’s always interesting to me how Agile conferences require final materials eight weeks in advance, but that’s another topic.

This is a major re-vamping of the talk to flow much like my new Measurable Business Value talk (which I’ll be giving in Richmond September 23rd). This talk introduces the Premise and Session Overview, then launches into a running example we do as a group for the remainder of the talk. It’s much more interactive throughout and I think it helps architects:

1. 1.Quantify the qualities of a system
   

2. 2.Discover designs that help achieve target levels of performance
   

3. 3.Identify the Next Best Design and integrate with Agile
   

The goal is that by the end of the presentation, architects have some new skills and tools they can use to help them with breaking-down and solving complex problems.

I use the image of this Ducati in the presentation to accentuate it’s not “what” a system does, it’s “how well” it performs that often matters. Most products in a mature market do about the same thing, they have mostly the same features and functions. Where they differ is in how well they perform along key quality dimensions. For this Ducati, these quality dimensions could be aesthetics and raw speed.

If you’ll be at the Agile Development Conference, if you’re going drop me a line and let’s meet up while I’m there.