2 DAY WORKSHOP
Collaborative Software Design
How to facilitate domain modelling decisions
Having difficulty collaborating with stakeholders and grasping the nuanced context of your software system? Explore the realm of collaborative software design to enhance stakeholder participation, make informed software design choices, and bolster team collaboration. Let’s revolutionise how you design and develop software.
This workshop is designed for anyone who is involved in creating and maintaining software:
- Software Developers & Engineers
- Software, Solution & Enterprise Architects
- Product Managers & Owners
- Business Analysts & Quality assurance roles
- Engineering managers & Scrum Masters
- Anyone interested in learning how to facilitate better decisions to improve their software design process.
Trainers
Kenny Baas-Schwegler
Evelyn van kelle
Gien Verschatse
About the
workshop
Effective software requires strong collaboration with stakeholders and within teams. However, misunderstandings and conflicts can affect sustainable software design decisions. Collaboration is a skill that must be learned and practised.
Visual collaboration tools can help clarify assumptions and improve teamwork, but tools alone are not enough—a facilitator is essential. Techniques and practices can guide effective collaboration for project leaders, business stakeholders, and technical contributors.
In this workshop, we’ll guide you towards making sustainable design decisions and improving stakeholder collaboration through collaborative modelling. You’ll gain insights into how social dynamics like ranking theory, cognitive biases, and conflicts and resistance behaviour affects design-decisions. Our focus is on teaching you to make sustainable design decisions that includes all the wisdom that a group holds supported by the entire group. We believe anyone involved in software creation can learn to facilitate collaborative sessions. Even if you don’t see yourself as a facilitator, you’ll discover how collaborative modelling enhances communication.
In our immersive 2-day workshop, we aim to teach and provide hands-on experience in addressing complex design and architectural decisions through collaborative modelling. Giving you a toolkit of strategies, techniques, and tools to ensure inclusive decision-making, leading to sustainable, quality software products.
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What you will learn
- The need for collaborative design: Why it is important for a software team to collaboratively design with their stakeholders, and what happens when they don’t.
- The ingredients of collaborative modelling: Gain an introduction to collaborative modelling as a powerful visualisation technique for analysing complex decisions and fostering shared understanding.
- Facilitating collaborative modelling: What do we mean by facilitation, what skills and techniques do facilitators need, and why is observing behavioural patterns so important?
- The influence of ranking: How someone’s explicit and implicit rank affect the outcome of decision-making, and how to observe that ranking within a group.
- The effect and opportunities of cognitive bias: Understand how mental shortcuts, or cognitive biases, affect decision-making and judgement, and learn how to design nudges to overcome them.
- Resistance and conflict resolution: Learn how to resolve conflicts and remove resistant behaviour that impedes collective decision-making.
- Making sustainable design decisions: Discover how the best software designs incorporate all the wisdom available to a group and select the most effective solution together.
- Communicating and documenting decisions: Explore the various ways to follow up and document the outcomes of collaborative modelling sessions.
Before
the workshop
To maximise your experience in this workshop, having done collaborative modelling before is useful.
For those eager to advance their preparation, you can prepare by starting by reading our book on Collaborative Software design. Before the workshop we will provide you with some introduction material on what collaborative modelling is.
Our workshop is highly interactive, designed to engage you in hands-on learning experiences. When conducted online, we utilise Miro, a versatile digital whiteboard tool, for our collaborative exercises. If you’re unfamiliar with Miro, we encourage you to take advantage of the self-paced participant onboarding course available at Miro Academy: Miro Participant Onboarding Course. This short course will equip you with the navigational knowledge needed to fully participate in our interactive sessions.