World Congress 2025 • Aug 20, 2025 • Session details

Why (most) software projects fail silently...

Andre Lesh reveals why software projects decay silently from early compromises and invisible technical debt. Stop asking permission for clean code and make it a non-negotiable professional standard.

Pause

Mute

Enter Fullscreen

#1 about 3 min

Defining silent failure in software projects

How long-term unsustainability and user rejection cause projects to fail before the failure becomes obvious.

#2 about 4 min

Translating internal software complexity to external perspectives

Why attributes like conformity, unseen code, and replicability make software complexity difficult for non-technical stakeholders to grasp.

#3 about 3 min

Balancing business value and software maintainability

How incentivizing short-term feature delivery increases the cost of change and decreases system stability over time.

#4 about 3 min

Planning multi-year restructures for legacy software systems

The difference between short-term refactoring and strategic multi-year restructuring plans for stabilizing aging codebases.

#5 about 3 min

Architectural planning to avoid crippling requirements debt

How the absence of technical documentation and solid requirements leads to messy, heavily patched software systems.

#6 about 7 min

Managing software lifecycles and value preserving work

Why budgeting for system stabilization and long-term maintenance is just as crucial as funding initial development.

#7 about 4 min

Cognitive bias and uncritical tech adoption in architecture

How survivorship bias and confirmation bias lead teams to adopt big tech patterns that ignore domain realities.

#8 about 2 min

Aligning software architecture with non-functional requirements

Using the ISO 25010 standard to prioritize foundational attributes like reliability over unconditionally applying trending microservices.

#9 about 3 min

Improving communication while defending foundational code quality

How developers can prevent silent failures by using domain language and treating code quality as non-negotiable.

Matching moments

2:25 min

Building engineering cultures that support long-term software architecture

Oskar Kruschitz

Oskar Kruschitz · Europe 2026 Virtual

2:30 min

Overcoming the human challenges of software maintenance

Robby Russell · Coffee With Developers

1:33 min

Preventing software architecture deterioration over product lifespans

Daniel Siegl +1 · LIVE

3:40 min

Identifying core challenges in modern software development

Markus Eisele

Markus Eisele · WWC 2024

1:19 min

Key takeaways for navigating software evolution and technical debt

Luisa Rink

Luisa Rink +1 · WWC Europe 2026

1:54 min

Embracing failures and analyzing high-profile software engineering mistakes

Christian Seifert · WWC 2022

More from World Congress 2025

GenAI Security: Navigating the Unseen Iceberg thumbnail

GenAI Security: Navigating the Unseen Iceberg

Maish Saidel-Keesing

Behind the Code: How Women Are Powering the Future of AI thumbnail

Behind the Code: How Women Are Powering the Future of AI

Alexandra Wudel, Laura Moritz, Madalina Florean

The AI Hype Filter: What’s Real, What’s Investable, What’s Noise? thumbnail

The AI Hype Filter: What’s Real, What’s Investable, What’s Noise?

Justus Lumpe, Konstantin Vinogradov, Nils Eiteneyer, Stephan Wirris

AI in Leadership: How Technology is Reshaping Executive Roles thumbnail

AI in Leadership: How Technology is Reshaping Executive Roles

Bernd Datler, Jasmin Kaiser, Jeff Hausmann, Sonja Alvarez

The AI-Ready Stack: Rethinking the Engineering Org of the Future thumbnail

The AI-Ready Stack: Rethinking the Engineering Org of the Future

Alex Laubscher, Jan Oberhauser, Keno Dreßel, Mirko Novakovic

AI Sovereignty: What Does It Take? thumbnail

AI Sovereignty: What Does It Take?

Boris Hecker, Clemens Wasner, Robin Hermann, Sonja Alvarez

Upcoming sessions on this topic

World Congress 2026 North America

When Humans Stop Writing Code: Rethinking Languages, Compilers, and Responsibility

Simon Auer

Organizer of flutter vienna meetup and CEO of marqably

Simon Auer

World Congress 2026 North America

How to generate business value through performance optimizations

Nikolai Sidiropulo

Software Engineer at Meta

Nikolai Sidiropulo

World Congress 2026 North America

Reinventing Testing Practices in the AI Era

Eric Deandrea

Java Champion & Senior Principal Software Engineer, IBM

Eric Deandrea

World Congress 2026 North America

There's no dark factory without better software verifiers

Dexter Horthy

Co-Founder, HumanLayer

Dexter Horthy

World Congress 2026 North America

The Broken Rung: How AI is Rebuilding Software Development from the Ground Up

Tomislav Tipurić

Chief Technology Officer, Nephos

Tomislav Tipurić

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

Confessions of a Software Archaeologist: What I Did Wrong in 10 Years of Restructuring Software thumbnail

WWC Europe 2026 • about 1 month ago

Confessions of a Software Archaeologist: What I Did Wrong in 10 Years of Restructuring Software

Hendrik Lösch

Shipping Quality Software In Hostile Environments thumbnail

WWC 2021 • about 5 years ago

Shipping Quality Software In Hostile Environments

Luka Kladaric

We (don't) need a software architect!?! thumbnail

WWC 2023 • almost 3 years ago

We (don't) need a software architect!?!

Hendrik Lösch

From Code to Culture: Why Leadership Determines Software Quality thumbnail

Europe 2026 Virtual • about 1 month ago

From Code to Culture: Why Leadership Determines Software Quality

Oskar Kruschitz

Modern software architectures thumbnail

WWC 2025 • 12 months ago

Modern software architectures

David Tielke

Move fast with Software Architecture thumbnail

WWC 2021 • about 5 years ago

Move fast with Software Architecture

Simon Lasselsberger

Related articles

AB

Andre Braun, GitLab

Now is the time for industrialized software development

Now is the time for industrialized software development Recently, I received a letter from my car’s manufacturer alerting me to a recall. They had discovered a defective part and wanted to replace ...

about 1 year ago

A person developint HTML on a laptop with the sun shining on it.

DC

Daniel Cranney

How to Avoid Over-Engineering

In today’s software development world, the demand for designing applications that are both robust and easy to maintain is more pressing than ever. Many developers encounter the architectural chaos ...

over 1 year ago

A series of code blocks with 'X's on showing they are incorrect, with one CSS block shown as the correct answer.

DC

Daniel Cranney

Ignore the Hype: How to Avoid Being Deceived by Technological Trends

Developers often find themselves tempted by the allure of the "next big thing." A shiny new framework, a trending library, the game-changing AI code assistant everyone is using. The tech industry's...

over 1 year ago

Ignore the Hype: How to Avoid Being Deceived by Technological Trends

BB

Benedikt Bischof

Get Old, go Slow, Write Code!

Welcome to the newest series of the WeAreDevelopers Magazine – Dev Talk Recap. This article recaps an interesting talk by Tobias Modig who gave advice about getting old(er) as a developer and slowi...

over 4 years ago

Get Old, go Slow, Write Code!

From learning to earning

Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.

Senior Software Engineer

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands

Expert Remote Ruby Golang Prolog

Tribe Lead - ( Software) Engineering Centre of Excllence

Expert Remote DevOps Backend Build Tools

Principal Software Engineer, Database Infrastructure

Experienced Remote Ruby MySQL Golang

29 days ago • Verified

Lead Software Engineer (f/m/d)

Personio SE & Co. KG

München, Germany

Expert Remote Java Kotlin Microservices

Staff Software Engineer, Database Infrastructure

Experienced Remote Ruby MySQL Golang

about 1 month ago

Senior Software Engineer, Enterprise Products

Expert $124k–329k Remote Ruby Bicep Golang