Two days, built for engineers.

Designing the ultimate software engineering checklist

Antonio Olmo Titos

This talk presents a proposal for a universal software engineering checklist: what form it might take (a book, a standard, a suite of tools?), and what evidence and sources it ought to draw upon. A compendium of all the best practices and tooling that any development team should adopt — spanning dependency vulnerability scanners, cryptographically signed commits, team retrospectives, application observability, technical debt metrics, and reproducible build distribution. Welcome to the fractal of software engineering. The field of software engineering emerged sixty years ago today as a relatively narrow niche at the intersection of mathematics and technology. Over the past three decades, however, it has grown extraordinarily complex, encompassing dozens of distinct disciplines and areas of specialisation, and is now far beyond the grasp of any single individual. Professional roles have become highly specialised — UX, SecDevOps, Developer Experience, cloud engineering — whilst a multitude of concerns and techniques intersect in any moderately ambitious project: security, performance, maintainability, AI-assisted development, continuous deployment, and more. Around the turn of the millennium, it still seemed feasible for an experienced engineer to remain conversant with the tooling, industry best practices, and foundational processes required to deliver a project successfully. Today, that prospect appears altogether unattainable. Whilst resources on specific topics are plentiful, there is no exhaustive compendium — no authoritative, comprehensive reference covering everything a development team ought to consider in order to optimise its productivity. There is even less prospect of a living document kept current with the latest advances in the field. We shall share the scale of the undertaking, some of the challenges encountered along the way, and take a brief tour through the fascinating fractal that software development has become.