Adam Tornhill, TweetFounder and CTO at Empear AB

Biography: Adam Tornhill

Adam Tornhill is a programmer that combines degrees in engineering and psychology. He’s the founder of Empear AB where he designs tools for software analysis. He's also the author of Your Code as a Crime Scene, has written the popular Lisp for the Web tutorial and self-published a book on Patterns in C. His other interests include modern history, music and martial arts.

Twitter: @AdamTornhill

Presentation: TweetTreat Your Code as a Crime Scene

Time: Wednesday 11:00 - 11:50 / Location: Promenade Ballroom B & C

We’ll never be able to understand large-scale systems from a single snapshot of the code. Instead we need to understand how the code evolved and how the people who work on it are organized. We also need strategies that let us find design issues and uncover hidden dependencies between both code and people. Where do you find such strategies if not within the field of criminal psychology?

This session will reveal the wealth of information that's stored in our version-control systems. You'll learn to predict bugs, detect architectural decay and find the code that is most expensive to maintain. Along the way you'll also see how you evaluate knowledge drain in your codebase, learn the social pitfalls of team work and much more. As a bonus you'll get an introduction to both modern offender profiling and its powerful counterparts in the software world.

To achieve this, the session combines research on software evolution with findings from various fields of psychology.

Workshop: Code as a Crime Scene Tweet

Time: Thursday 09:00 - 16:00 / Location: Room 4

We’ll never be able to understand large-scale systems from a single snapshot of the code. Instead, we need to understand how the code evolves and how the people who work on it are organized. In this workshop you'll learn novel analysis techniques to support both those technical and organizational decisions around your codebase.

The techniques are based on software evolution. They use data from the most underused informational source that we have in our industry: our version-control systems. Combined with metaphors from forensic psychology you'll learn to analyze version-control data to:
* Identify the code that's most expensive to maintain amongst millions lines of code.
* Predict the modules that are most prone to defects.
* Detect architectural decay and learn to control it.
* Analyze different architectures such as layers and microservices.

Since large-scale software development is also a social activity, we'll make sure to cover techniques that let you:
* Build a knowledge map of your codebase.
* Understand how multiple developers influence code quality and what you can do about it.
* Get a psychological perspective on the challenges and pitfalls of large-scale development.

We'll analyze systems written in different languages such as C#, Java, and Scala to illustrate that the techniques you'll learn are language agnostic. Once you've finished this workshop you'll have a completely new way to look at your codebase and a powerful toolbox.

Style: This workshop is delivered in a practical hands-on style. We'll mix theory with hands-on analyses. The exercises are done by analyzing real-world systems to find real problems.

Audience: This workshop is for programmers and software architects. While we use Git for the exercises, the techniques aren't limited to Git and we'll also discuss how you use them with other version-control systems such as Subversion and Mercurial.

Preparations: Participants need to bring their own laptops. You'll receive detailed installation and preparation instructions before the workshop.