The speed / quality trade-off fallacy gets many teams stuck in downward spiral 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.

From example mapping, to behaviour-driven development, to domain-driven design practices like event storming and domain storytelling, we now have a wide range of tools for collaboratively building knowledge about domains and creating models of those domains for building software systems.

One gap that many organisations experience is the management of that domain knowledge over time. Domains evolve. Team members learn new aspects of the domain, or invent more useful models. Team members leave - taking domain knowledge with them, and new members join but never get the chance to participate in foundational collaborative modelling.

Living documentation is a set of practices to help ensure institutional knowledge is reliable, collaborative and low-effort.

In this workshop you'll get hands-on practice with modern living documentation tools such as Contextive that help apply these principles to the task of managing that critical domain knowledge.

In this highly collaborative and hands-on workshop we will:

1. Split into separate teams who will each explore a different domain, building and capturing domain knowledge using our standard development environments
2. Shuffle team members between teams to experience helping new-comers learn the domain knowledge you have already distilled
3. Respond to an external change prompting the maintenance of evolving domain knowledge over time
   
   You'll leave well prepared to empower your teams to skilfully manage complex and evolving domain knowledge in your businesses.
   
   Additional notes
   Participants should bring laptops with git, and an IDE like VSCode or a Jetbrains product installed.