No software system is perfect. At least that fact keeps things interesting and keeps us busy, but what do you do when your system is further away from perfection than you’re comfortable with?

It may be you are dealing with a legacy monolith, a system that has strange logic, no documentation and/or hardly any conventions you can recognise. Everything seems to be on fire and you need to stabilise the situation.

We’ll explore some techniques that are useful when working on systems that need a little love. At a high-level, we will go through approaching testing, monitoring, re-architecting and documenting these systems. We will also go through prioritisation when everything is urgent and the non-technical metrics that can help with buy-in for stabilising your system and team.

This talk is an intermediate level talk. The aim is for you to not only learn how to deal with these situations but want to tackle the challenges they present and be excited about the change you can lead.