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Anniversary OOP - OOP is not just celebrating itself

25 years of OOP and 15 years of Agile Manifesto - if that's not a good reason to celebrate! So the organizers invited everyone to a party on Tuesday after the "ultimate IT get-together". However, it was more lame than raucous. Unlike the conference itself!

Consensus and consensus democracy

There were two presentations that dealt intensively with the type of decision-making in systems and organizations. As we introduced a new decision-making process at punkt.de some time ago, I was very interested in what I would learn here.

Uwe Lübbermann presented the partnership model of collaboration at Premium. This includes not only the employees themselves, but also as many business partners as possible. At Premium, decisions are made by consensus, which means that all those affected must agree to a decision. In the start-up phase, Uwe Lübbermann explains, it can take a long time before a decision is made, but he believes that this will ease over time once the decision-making process has settled in.

Making decisions by consensus is similar. All those affected are included in the decision-making process, but it is sufficient to pass a decision if there is no veto for a decision. Sociocracy 3.0, or S3 for short, works with this decision-making principle. As some things only become clear once they have been tried out, a decision is not fixed in time, but can be made again and again. Precisely when it becomes clear that those affected by the decision have encountered new objections.

Leading self-organization = protecting diversity

As soon as it comes to making decisions, the topic of self-organization is also present. There was a highly recommended full-day workshop by Andrea Proviglioni on the role of the manager in self-organized teams and organizations. Various aspects of leadership were developed in exercises for which the participants had to repeatedly come together in new constellations. Among other things, this served to promote diversity - with the aim of opening up as broad a space as possible for information and solutions.

These experiences were underpinned and consolidated by Andrea Proviglioni's sound theoretical knowledge and wealth of personal experience. And, of course, the aspect of diversity is just one of many that play a role in leading the way to self-organization.

The IT topics

Microservices are currently the subject of much and sometimes very controversial discussion. The CD pipeline is also still an issue, which in many cases requires us to get the "ops" on board as early as the development process, which brings us to the topic of "DevOps", i.e. also the topic of "cross-functional teams": Another organizational topic!
The topics of testing and requirements engineering can also be placed in the context of cross-functional teams: the better it is possible to involve testers in the development process or to involve developers in the requirements engineering process, the faster results can be achieved that can be put into production.

In his keynote speech, Frank Simon from the German Testing Board promoted a modern understanding of testing. The tester who comes around the corner and always ruins everything is a thing of the past! Ultimately, there is no alternative: because if you want to be fast and react flexibly, you have no choice but to use consistent, automated testing to continuously maintain the quality of your software - right through to operation.

Requirements engineering had its own track - but I was always more interested in one of the other topics, which is why I didn't attend any of the sessions on this subject.

Sascha Lobo ...

..., who gave a keynote speech on the social responsibility of the software industry, was, in my opinion, right with this message in terms of content, BUT I thought the presentation seemed unprepared, therefore full of repetitions and only halfway functioning improvisation. I personally wouldn't have needed it!

He canceled his participation in the "ultimate IT regulars' table", an OOP tradition, at short notice, according to the organizer, "because he had to go on Markus Lanz."

Unfortunately, many of the other keynotes had the feel of a promotional event.

Conclusion of my first OOP

The OOP is great, simply an institution where you can check how close you are to the pulse of IT - or where you should "catch up" if you want to stay on the ball.

And: you don't have to be a software architect to find lots of great inspiration there! However, you don't necessarily have to be there every year.

Finally, a few impressions of the conference: