From DAX company to church: Experiences from 10 years analyzing complex software systems

In our audits we identify major challenges for the future-proofness of software systems. Our customers range from public administration to DAX companies, startups and the church. In this talk we share our experiences from analyzing more than 100 systems during the last ten years. The challenges include inscrutable code organization, vintage technology stacks, architectures without modularization and customer variants created by copy and paste.

What these challenges have in common is that they do not simply drop out of a tool. Instead, each challenge is preceded by collecting evidence, tying together manual inspection and automated analysis, applying appropriate visualizations and making the right conclusions. Hence, we do not only share the final results, but focus on the methodology and individual steps we made to identify the challenges. We hope this will be inspiration for other architects to identify challenges in their own systems.