Joseph Yoder

Joseph (Joe) Yoder (agilist, computer scientist, speaker, and author) is the founder and principal of The Refactory, a company focused on software architecture, design, implementation, consulting, and mentoring on all facets of software development. Joe is also the president of The Hillside Group, a non-profit dedicated to improving the quality of life of everyone who uses, builds, and encounters software systems. Joe has presented many tutorials and talks, arranged workshops, given keynotes, and helped organize leading international agile and technical conferences. He is best known as an author of the Big Ball of Mud pattern, which illuminates many fallacies in software architecture.

Joe teaches and mentors developers on Agile and lean practices, architecture, building flexible systems, clean design, patterns, refactoring, and testing. Recently, Joe has been working with organizations and thought leaders on the best practices for including quality aspects throughout the complete software life-cycle. Joe thinks software is still too hard to change and wants to do something about this. He believes using good practices (patterns), putting the ability to change software into the hands of the people with the knowledge to change it, and bringing the business side closer to the development process helps solve this problem.

Joe is a coauthor of Cloud Application Architecture Patterns—Designing, Building, and Modernizing for the Cloud by O’Reilly, which has 75 patterns of proven practices to design and build applications to run well in the cloud. Joe is also a coauthor of A Scrum Book: The Spirit of the Game, which includes 94 patterns and 2 pattern languages about getting the most out of Scrum. Joe recently coauthored the book Cloud Application Architecture Patterns—Designing, Building, and Modernizing for the Cloud, which contains 70 patterns that can be used when building applications for the cloud. Joe received the New Directions award at the Software Engineering Institute’s conference on Software Architecture. The ACM recognized Joe as a Distinguished Member in the category of “Outstanding Engineering Contributions to Computing,” and the Hillside Group awarded Joe as a Hillside Fellow.

I have also written books under the name Joe Yoder.