WeAreDevelopers Logo WeAreDevelopers
Sign in
For You LIVE
World Congress 2026 Europe • Jul 9, 2026 • Session details

You Will Migrate Eventually: A developer approach to technology adoption

Luisa Rink , Wouter Ligtenberg

Technical debt is a high-interest loan drawn for execution speed, not an engineering failure. Discover how ING's phase-based tech adoption model scales backend architecture without drowning in legacy code.

Pause
Mute Enter Fullscreen
#1 about 4 min

Acknowledging the inevitability of software evolution and technology migrations

Because software environments constantly evolve, engineering teams must view architectural migrations as entirely normal operational requirements.

#2 about 3 min

Integrating an acquired startup and evaluating technical debt challenges

Scaling an acquired minimal product into a full banking portfolio exposes the severe limitations of temporary technical shortcuts.

#3 about 2 min

Visualizing product lifecycles through a technology migration model

A migration model based on organizational physics connects a product's timeline and business value to specific technical actions.

#4 about 2 min

Entering the sprout phase by reusing global technology stacks

Leveraging existing global components during the initial exploration phase eliminates early migrations and dramatically accelerates preliminary development cycles.

#5 about 2 min

Preventing early migrations with rapid prototyping in the piloted phase

Gathering early feedback through rapid prototyping allows teams to validate ideas quickly without committing to flawed, tightly coupled systems.

#6 about 3 min

Managing scope and intentional technical debt during the build phase

Product building requires strict scope control and documenting conscious technical debt as temporary speed loans that must be repaid.

#7 about 4 min

Balancing new features with system stability in the scaled phase

As organizational value peaks, teams are forced to refactor accumulated technical debt to prevent systemic outages and sustain further scale.

#8 about 2 min

Ensuring stable product maintenance during the operated phase

Maintaining mature products involves continuous, underlying infrastructure upgrades to preserve organizational value and prevent unexpected dependency failures.

#9 about 3 min

Retiring technical products with intention through graceful shutdowns

Recognizing when a feature causes negative impacts enables teams to execute immediate rollbacks and communicate graceful retirements efficiently.

#10 about 2 min

Key takeaways for navigating software evolution and technical debt

Adapting to inevitable technological changes requires managing debt intentionally, aligning strategies with lifecycle stages, and showing courage during deprecation.

#11 about 2 min

Managing feature scope and transitioning between technological adoption phases

Teams naturally transition between structural phases over time, but initial requirement planning must remain robust even as needs evolve.

Matching moments

4:27 min

Evaluating tech stack migrations driven by industry hype

Chris Heilmann +2 · LIVE

2:32 min

Transitioning across tech stacks into mobile application development

Sylvia Dieckmann · LIVE

2:24 min

Using failed adoption to drive necessary architectural improvements

Sonja Nesic Sonja Nesic · WWC Europe 2026

4:30 min

Adapting legacy product ecosystems and identifying technical red flags

Christian Nagel Christian Nagel +3 · WWC 2025

6:07 min

Post-migration technical debt cleanup and sociotechnical reflections

Sebastian Hans · LIVE

2:20 min

How the inevitable march of time breaks software patterns

Peter Kröner Peter Kröner · WWC 2023

More from World Congress 2026 Europe

Building the Nervous System of AI - Michael Kagan (NVIDIA) thumbnail
29:17
about 1 month ago

Building the Nervous System of AI - Michael Kagan (NVIDIA)

Michael Kagan, Sead Ahmetović

Five Things in Tech that Matter Now - WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2026 Closing Keynote thumbnail
19:41
about 1 month ago

Five Things in Tech that Matter Now - WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2026 Closing Keynote

Christian Heilmann

The Sound of Your Secrets: Teaching Your Model to Spy, So You Can Learn to Defend thumbnail
32:06
about 1 month ago

The Sound of Your Secrets: Teaching Your Model to Spy, So You Can Learn to Defend

David vonThenen

Super scaling for the Super Bowl: How to survive 30 million users hitting your backend in 30 minutes thumbnail
35:13
about 1 month ago

Super scaling for the Super Bowl: How to survive 30 million users hitting your backend in 30 minutes

Irina Branovic

Running Secure Life Science Research at Scale using Hybrid GPU HPC and Kubernetes 🧬 thumbnail
24:23
about 1 month ago

Running Secure Life Science Research at Scale using Hybrid GPU HPC and Kubernetes 🧬

Jeremy Murray

Angstfreude - AI and Corporate Culture - The Thrill and the Threat thumbnail
30:26
about 1 month ago

Angstfreude - AI and Corporate Culture - The Thrill and the Threat

Axel Ebert, Karin Krobath

Upcoming sessions on this topic

Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

Culture Doesn't Scale Itself: Leading Engineering Teams Through Hypergrowth and the AI Transition

Thanos Baskous

VP of Engineering and Co-founder of Cogent Security

Thanos Baskous
Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

Agentic Drift: keeping pace with your agents

John Coghlan

Senior Director, Developer Advocacy at GitLab

John Coghlan
Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

How to generate business value through performance optimizations

Nikolai Sidiropulo

Software Engineer at Meta

Nikolai Sidiropulo
Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

Designing APIs That Survive AI Agents at Scale

Phani Pendurthi

Mastercard, Principal Software Engineer

Phani Pendurthi
Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

Merging at Scale: From Broken Builds to Green Mainline

Manjari Akella, Preetam Dwivedi

Manjari Akella
Preetam Dwivedi
Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

From Legacy to Longevity – How a 17-Year-Old System stayed Modern

Alexander Arians

Empowering Engineers to drive innovation

Alexander Arians

Related videos

Next Level Enterprise Architecture: Modular, Flexible, Scalable, Multichannel and AI-Ready? thumbnail
21:19
WWC 2024 • almost 2 years ago

Next Level Enterprise Architecture: Modular, Flexible, Scalable, Multichannel and AI-Ready?

Linda, Maik

Move fast with Software Architecture thumbnail
42:02
WWC 2021 • about 5 years ago

Move fast with Software Architecture

Simon Lasselsberger

The Migration Cookbook thumbnail
30:16
WWC Europe 2026 • about 1 month ago

The Migration Cookbook

Robert Lehmann

Retooling and refactoring - an investment in people. thumbnail
50:23
LIVE • over 4 years ago

Retooling and refactoring - an investment in people.

Andrew Holway

Throwing off the burdens of scale in engineering thumbnail
32:00
WWC 2023 • almost 3 years ago

Throwing off the burdens of scale in engineering

David Singleton, Thomas Pamminger

Resistant to hype: How to avoid being deceived by technological trends? thumbnail
24:07
WWC 2024 • almost 2 years ago

Resistant to hype: How to avoid being deceived by technological trends?

Szymon Chmal

Related articles

From learning to earning

Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.