Barry’s core idea of residuality is pretty simple, but absolutely not trivial nor legacy.
The fancy takeaway is that, even with its simplicity, it enables a very effective new approach to system architecture evaluation and review. In the meantime, he defines an easily computable numerical metric that allows you to measure whether your reviewed solution is improving or not compared to the previous iteration.
Being simple and effective makes it really worth investigating, even if adopting it may require reviewing—and possibly dropping—some legacy tools that have repeatedly failed to deliver the expected insights, regardless of the amount of praise and words spent preaching them.

I loved the time spent with such remarkable colleagues and Barry O’Reilly as a mentor during the Advanced Software Architecture Workshop – Design software systems for complex business environments with Residuality Theory, organized by Avanscoperta.
The certificate of attendance is a little thing compared to other amount and quality of notions Barry can transmit, and I’m glad to Avanscoperta for bringing him to Italy. This has been really going “in Avanscoperta”!

This has been a fun and challenging experience. It was challenging because it is awesome to see some scientific rigour applied to our industry, where we still tend to make decisions based on intuition.

This has nicely messed up my mind in very fun ways and leaves me hungry to discover more.

I look forward to letting these thoughts mess with the quick assumptions we’re used to making and to continuing to change my perspectives.

It was also great to do this workshop with a very nice crown. I deeply enjoyed the debates and chats, which added to the already high value of the experience.

I would recommend this workshop to those who already have a fair amount of experience with the design of distributed systems of a certain complexity and are looking for tools for concrete evaluation of architectures, and new visions of design. It is a workshop that should be approached with a very open mind.