High performance in software development

<!--HTML--><p style="text-align: justify;">What are the ingredients of high-performing software?</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Software development, especially for large high-performance systems, is one the most complex tasks mankind has ever tried. Technological change leads to huge opportunities but challenges our old ways of working.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Processing large data sets, possibly in real time or with other tight computational constraints, requires an efficient solution architecture. Efficiency requirements span from the distributed storage and large-scale organization of computation and data onto the lowest level of processor and data bus behavior. Integrating performance behavior over these levels is especially important when the computation is resource-bounded, as it is in numerics: physical simulation, machine learning, estimation of statistical models, etc.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">For example, memory locality and utilization of vector processing are essential for harnessing the computing power of modern processor architectures due to the deep memory hierarchies of modern general-purpose computers. As a rule of thumb, a highly modularized software with distributed state leads to poor performance. At the same time, structure of the system naturally aligns to the communication structure of the organization designing it (Conway&rsquo;s law).</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">To achieve good design and high performance of complex systems require diverse collaboration with an empirical mindset: rapid validation and ability to change direction when our assumptions become disqualified. This is very different from traditional process-oriented engineering and requires different organizational structure and behavior.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">In this talk we share our experiences from creating critical, large, fault-tolerant and high-performing systems during the last 20 years. We&rsquo;ve been working with global companies such as HBO, Panasonic, Samsung and Supercell, that are all dependent on high-performing software. We show what has worked, what not and why. We&rsquo;ll cover the topics of productivity, efficiency and quality what are the issues that have the biggest impact on these in software development. We&rsquo;ll discuss about the common assumptions, beliefs and misconceptions that we see in the field.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Other topics:</p> <ul> <li>Agile development</li> <li>How to make things easier in software development</li> <li>How to avoid doing unnecessary work</li> <li>How to deal with distributed teams</li> <li>Code quality and performance</li> <li>Maintenance and further development of existing systems.</li> <li>Data analysis at scale</li> </ul> <h4>About the speakers</h4> <p style="text-align: justify;">Juha-Matti is a Systems architect with broad experience in different ICT technologies and fields of application, with focus on open source technologies, security, and embedded solutions.&nbsp;He also does a lot of training, coaching, concepting and review work.&nbsp;His specialty is in understanding things, and making things understandable to others.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> Petri is a product development generalist with 25 years of experience in a variety of industries globally. He has a broad experience in various product development positions ranging from hands-on engineering to management, coaching, change management, customer and vendor management to sales. Petri has been working with smaller startups as well as large 50 000+ employee global companies with multi-site development in Europe, Middle East, Asia and USA. <p style="text-align: justify;"> Petri was one of creators of Lean and agile movement in Finland. He is the co-creator of the Agile conference in Finland (ScanAgile) and has been speaking at different companies and international conferences on agile product development. Petri is a pioneer of Lean and agile product development in Finland to practicing them from year 2001. He is an expert in scaling Agile in large companies.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Jouni is Data Scientist, a seasoned specialist in statistical modeling and machine learning, with a solid academic background and experience in wide variety of business applications and analytical software development. Jouni is a doctor of philosophy from University of Essen, with major of theoretical physics and statistical physics.</p>