Greenfield Effect - Patterns for Effective Disaster Delivery

The talk introduces a concept of Greenfield Effect - a cognitive fallacy affecting most of our profession today. It causes us to seek for opportunities to design systems from scratch and stay away from legacy codebases. We acquire helplessness in the domain of fixing problems that are "too big".

The talk starts with a short review of major software catastrophes of the last decade along with their root causes. A common theme is prolonged, systematic organizational negligence of issues that incrementally lead to a disaster. After that comes the main part of the talk which introduces several organizational and behavioral anti-patterns, each of them being one step towards a disaster.

The talk keeps slightly sarcastic and comedic tone in order to keep the audience engaged, however the problem it is trying to highlight might be the most crucial issue in modern software engineering domain. The understanding of it can prevent real world disasters from happening, save capital, and possibly even human lives.