DDD Europe 2025 - Program

A Defence of Technical Excellence

DDD Europe - Talk (50min)

Speakers

Chris Simon

Chris Simon
Date
Description

The speed / quality trade-off fallacy gets many teams stuck in negative feedback loops - sacrificing quality for speed, both are lost.

Teams find their backlogs filled with bugs, their stakeholders frustrated by missed deadlines and the teams themselves unhappy and stressed.

Systems thinking, and in particular using causal loop diagrams to identify the feedback loops at play can shed light on how and why the fallacy is so tempting yet so destructive.

In this talk I'll demonstrate the building of a range of causal feedback loops to visualise the underlying causes of the problems. With such visualisations we can advocate for the practices of technical excellence that counter the pressures of the fallacy, such as collaborative modelling with domain-driven design, test driven development & living documentation.

About Chris Simon

Chris is a technology coach and advisor helping technology teams drive business success. He has a particular focus on helping startups realise their vision and new CTOs flourish in their roles. He also supports executives & boards with strategic technology advice, and engineering teams with training, mentoring and consulting in architecture, quality, domain-driven design and test driven development.

He is a regular meetup & conference speaker (https://chrissimon.au/speaking/) and to support teams using Domain-Driven Design, he recently launched https://contextive.tech & co-founded the DDD Australia meetup.

He is the technical co-founder of https://www.inloop.com.au, home of Australian Fintech success stories https://www.flexischools.com.au and https://www.lanternpay.com (recently acquired by NAB).