Continuous Architecture and Code Modernization With Team Habits and the 1% Method

This presentation aims to motivate you to consider modernizing architectures and codebases in small, continuous steps with the help of two ideas. These ideas are: team habits and the 1% method. The combination of both will enable you and your teams to establish a sustainable practice of ongoing modernization with very small steps that accumulate continuously, ultimately resulting in better architectures and more maintainable codebases without risking much disruption, risk, or even large budgets and the associated politics.

The basic ideas behind this approach come from the book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear, who presented them in the context of personal processes in private and business life. However, many of these approaches can also be applied to software engineering teams, which is what this presentation is about.

The goal is to establish improvements in the team on a regular basis, ideally daily, in the smallest possible steps. These steps should be so small that they have no significant impact on day-to-day business and that each of these steps, taken in isolation, does not represent a significant/noticeable improvement. However, if these micro or nano improvements accumulate across the entire team over a longer period of time, you will see that their effect grows exponentially. This presentation introduces the idea, motivates you to implement it, and helps you establish it in your teams.