Factor In People and Org to Build Software That Lasts - Vanessa Formicola

Seven patterns that appear in every company, and none of them are purely technical

Why do so many software teams end up with the exact architecture they never intended to build? With Vanessa Formicola I talk about the hidden forces that shape technical decisions, and why those forces have far less to do with technology than most engineers want to admit. We get into patterns she calls the kitchen sink, Cirque de Soleil coding, and the monolith constellation, each one a recognizable trap that grows from career incentives, delivery pressure, and organizational culture rather than bad technical judgment. I keep coming back to her concept of holistic engineering, which asks us to treat an organization as a living system and factor in product direction, people's actual lives, and structural dynamics when making architectural choices.

"Be careful about what you measure because you get what you measure." - Vanessa Formicola

Vanessa Formicola is a Principal Architect and Head of TASC (Technology, Architecture and Software Craft) with over 15 years of industry experience at Microsoft and ThoughtWorks, including more than seven years in leadership roles. She specializes in transforming socio-technical systems, modernizing software architectures, enabling teams, and advancing engineering best practices. Her expertise spans high-scale backend systems, legacy modernization, and infrastructure as code across diverse domains and technology stacks. Experienced in leading globally distributed teams, Vanessa is also a public speaker, community builder, and advocate for diversity, inclusion, and social change.

Highlights:

• Career frameworks that reward visible impact push engineers to add code to shared, widely-used services rather than doing the right architectural work, because a link to a popular PR is easier to present in a performance review than six months of disciplined refactoring.
• A monolith nobody dares to touch on a Monday morning in a planned sprint will still have to be handled on a Saturday night when it breaks in production, making fear of change a larger operational risk than the change itself.
• Holistic engineering means factoring non-technical variables, including product strategy, legislation, people's life events, and org dynamics, into technical decisions, because those variables directly shape the code that gets written.
• Cirque de Soleil coding, stuffing every available design pattern and new library into a feature, signals a culture that rewards complexity over simplicity and raises long-term maintenance costs beyond what the feature justifies.
• Architecture and team structure must be aligned with product domains, because a mismatch between team boundaries and system boundaries creates flow blockages that no technical decision made inside those constraints can fully resolve.

📌 Testing is a people business, humanity as a superpower. That is my talk on October 7 at HUSTEF 2026 in Budapest: See programme and tickets