System Metaphor was and is an elusive practice of the original XP. It has largely been forgotten over time.

Yet in the past few years, my colleagues and I have discovered the stunning power of a genuine System Metaphor on our own shipping product. This makes us wonder why System Metaphor ever went out of vogue.

This session will explore why Metaphor matters. We’ll examine how our own Music Metaphor reshaped our flagship product, even our company, and how the right metaphor can supply the driving beat that can turn your product into a hit.

How long did it take before your last project was able to put a first version into production? How long was the release cycle after that? The basic premise of this tutorial is that any project that is unable to release to production every three months has a problem. The product owner should actively work towards reducing the length of releases. The idea of releasing often is not new. Most agile approaches recommend frequent releases. This tutorial is based on our study of concrete strategies projects use to actually reduce the length of releases and find a Minimal Releaseable Product.

From infancy, we use metaphors to make sense of abstract concepts. The metaphors we choose have huge cultural significance, and bring with them both a rich vocabulary for discussing the target concept, and a bag of related concepts. And if we are not careful, we can sometimes believe those related concepts to be true of the real situation, forgetting we are in the land of the metaphor.

So it is with some architectural patterns — notably those that make use of layers. This session will shine a light on some assumptions we make about software when we forget we are in the land of metaphors.