Have you ever thought about why what we see as the sensible defaults for software engineering in 2023 work? We adopt the key metrics from Accelerate, team structures from Team Topologies and Microservices in an effort to improve the flow of value to our users (or to a customer saying Thank You, paraphrasing Daniel Terhorst-North). 

But what is Value? What is Flow? James will use ideas from Information Theory and Complexity Science to peek into the domain model of our everyday experiences turning ideas into running software. Come along and explore the weird world of how work works. Warning, may cause you to reduce batch sizes, because maths.

Recent research summarised in the book points to a set of practices that lead to high software development organisation performance. Simultaneously, research from the Santa Fe institute on Complex Adaptive Systems over the last 20 years seems to point to a grand unified theory of organisational design. So have we cracked it? Do we now have the answer to the question: how do we create and scale high performing software and organisations? In this talk, James explores the relationships between team structure, software architecture and the emergent phenomenon of complexity science.