Sonal Premi
Business Architect by day, community builder at other times
Melbourne, Australia
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Sonal is a Business Architect, with close to two decades of tech experience. The core of her experience has been in understanding key business drivers and needs, to shape solutions that address business challenges. She’s passionate about all things agility, technology transformation, outcomes that benefit end users, and challenging conventionally accepted norms. Her experience within tech is supported by a Master’s degree in Cyber Security and an MBA.
Sonal has a relentless commitment to building people and communities, and enjoys engaging with tech communities. You can find her co-organising the domain-driven design Australia meetups as well as the analysis-design-architecture focussed conference ADAConf.
Sonal is partial to conversations about problem solving and decision making processes. When not saving the world one problem at a time, she spends her time learning new skills, mentoring people, travelling and drinking copious amounts of tea.
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What binge watching Aircrash Investigations has taught me about Agile
'Agile' is not the agile manifesto. It is neither a process, not is it merely an interpretation of the four values of "individuals and interactions", "responding to change", "working software", and "customer collaboration". It is a large body of work pre-dating the 'manifesto for agile development' that enable businesses to respond to a changing customer context.
In this session, I will step away from software development practices, and share what I have learnt watching and reading stories of aviation professionals responding to a channging context. I'd like to take a few air incidents as case studies and distill distill patterns of human behaviour and leadership that either enabled a successful outcome, or led to a disaster. And finally, I'd like to build on those to make a case that for patterns that make software development more effective based on my previous experiences.
Let's talk about human behaviours, leadership, and being on top of the ‘working-effectively-together-to-respond-to-change’ game!
Security fails at the seams: Using Domain Modelling to test a hypothesis
As analysts, engineers, and delivery folk, consulting to clients with areas of a lot of uncertainty, there is often a need to justify our "why": why are we investing time and energy building bespoke engineering solutions; what value would the business derive to motivated to pay for this?
In one of my recent projects, within the area of security and risk controls automation, this question of "why" came up multiple times, to justify the value to the business, to justify how the program of work was shaped, and equally importantly, to aid prioritisation of the program of work.
In this presentation, I explore how heuristics can be used for problem solving. If we started with a hypothesis, and then modelled our use cases using various heuristics to test the hypothesis, can we arrive at sufficient clarity to solve our prioritisation problem? At this point, you and George Box are likely to say, "but Sonal, all models are wrong". Yes, I agree, but humour me.
I'd like to share a story about experiments with DDD, Bounded Context and problem solving, and uncover the utility of getting creative with domain modelling. I hope to demonstrate value of modelling for reducing ambiguity, and its ability to shape and prioritise a program of work.
The Art and Science of Problem Solving
Problem solving is a core skill that architects employ all the time, and this is the skill that enables businesses to justify the “why” - the value of the work to the business; and enable teams to arrive at a ‘reasonable starting point’ in an environment of uncertainty and ambiguity.
Regardless of what the ‘problem’ is, there is a consistent approach and learning process that enables a ‘solution’. To demonstrate this approach, let’s look at three very different use cases and talk through:
1. The ‘science’ of problem solving: a process with 3 simple elements of ‘framing the problem’, ‘understanding the problem space’ and ‘synthesising to a goal’
2. The ‘art’ of problem solving: digging into your toolkit to find one that applies, and continuously testing your approach to work through ambiguity
3. Cross-pollinating the art with approaches learnt from areas such as air-crash investigations, and cross-pollinating the science with non-tech anecdotes
As a takeaway from this talk, architects, analysts, developers, and broadly anyone working with real world problems, will be able to use their current toolbox more effectively within a problem solving context
- I presented a specific problem solved using a DDD approach at the domain-driven design Europe conference (2023). After that presentation, I felt there is a broader story to be told about problem solving which does not get addressed in conferences focussed on one specific tool or technique. Hence, I wrote this talk looking at different types of business problems
- Presented an early version of the "problem solving" talk at the Tech Leading Ladies meetup, Melbourne (2024)
- Another iteration presented at ADAConf, Melbourne (2024)
Analysis, Design & Architecture Conference 2024 Sessionize Event
Domain-Driven Design Europe 2023 Sessionize Event
Sonal Premi
Business Architect by day, community builder at other times
Melbourne, Australia
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