The Benefits of Time Travel

Time travel has captivated our attention in mainstream media and entertainment for many years. However, despite how much we might wish to one day explore different aspects of the past and future, science and the second law of thermodynamics are trying to convince us that time travel is simply not possible. Well, I’m here to show you that time travel is real, it’s just not in the way we think. While we may not be physically capable of traveling between the past and the future, we can utilize data to understand the past far more clearly and use that to put our futures on a better trajectory. And this is even more true in the realms of software engineering where we can utilize data in significant ways to have a big impact on how we approach and improve both our software design, testing patterns, and human habits for the future to allow us to deliver quality software that has an impact. This talk does touch technical aspects but is otherwise very fun and lightweight with a focus more on better understanding the types of data and lessons we can learn from it than going into the details of how we can extract that data in our systems to learn the right lessons. The outline of the talk will include: - How we can approach learning from our past - Examples of how we can work with data to provide these learnings - Example of metrics and how to use them to improve testing and development in the future