Joseph (Joe) W. Yoder is a 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 a leader in many areas of software development, specifically with Agile Best Practices. Joe's work has included working with both large and small companies, as well as working with startup organizations. Joe has years of practical hands-on experience: he has conducted architecture and design reviews of enterprise applications and systems, reviewed the design and implementation of various systems and frameworks, provided assessments and detailed analyses of existing systems, assisted with framework and object-oriented development, designed and performed custom training, and led various successful Agile teams.

Joe was a member of the Software Architecture and Patterns group at the University of Illinois. Joe is an international speaker and pattern author, a long-standing member of the ACM, and the President of The Hillside Group, a group dedicated to improving the quality of software development. Joe specializes in Software Architecture, Analysis and Design, Agile Methods, Adaptable Systems, Patterns, Refactoring, Reuse, and Frameworks. Joe is the author of many papers, including the Big Ball of Mud pattern, which illuminates fallacies in many approaches to software architecture. Joe is programming-language agnostic and has worked with many programming languages including object-oriented, functional, procedural, logical, and scripting.

Joe has worked on numerous projects using a variety of technologies. ranging from stand-alone to client-server applications, web applications, web services, cloud computing, service-oriented architecture, microservices, multi-tiered, various databases, object-oriented, frameworks, human-computer interaction, collaborative environments, and domain-specific visual-languages. These projects have spanned several domains, including Medical Information Systems, Financial Systems, Ordering, Import, Invoicing, Print, Shipping, Warehouse Management, Manufacturing, Medical Examination, Statistical Analysis, Scenario Planning, a Client-Server Relational Database System for keeping track of shared specifications in a multi-user environment, a Telecommunications Billing System, and Business & Medical Decision Making.

Joe has been teaching Agile/Lean Methods (such as Scrum, XP, Mob Programming, TDD), Design Patterns, Object Design, Refactoring, Clean Code, Being Agile at Qualities, and Testing in industrial settings. Additionally, Joe has been providing assessments and evaluations, consulting and mentoring people on the above concepts, and assisting agile teams building and deploying various systems. This work has also included deploying frameworks and Domain-Specific Languages. Joe also won the New Directions award at the Software Engineering Institutes (SEI) Software Architecture conference (SATURN), which is given to the presentation that best describes innovative new approaches and thought leadership in the application of architecture-centric practices; his winning presentation was called “QA to AQ: Shifting from Quality Assurance to Agile Quality.”

Joe believes software is still too hard to change. He wants to do something about this and believes that this problem can be approached with good practices, 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.

Professional Activities:

Joe has presented a number of keynotes, tutorials, and talks; arranges workshops; and organizes technical conferences, including international conferences such as Agile, Agile Brazil, Agile Portugal, Encontro Ágil, AOSD, CBSoft, GOTO, JAOO, JDD, OOP, QCon, YOW!, , PLoP, AsianPLoP, SugarLoafPLoP, EuroPLoP, OOPSLA, ECOOP, SATURN, SPLASH, and TOOLS. He has been on the program committee for some of these conferences. Joe is a long-standing member of the following organizations: ACM, Agile Alliance, and The Hillside Group. He has interacted with professors at University São Paulo, Faculty of Engineering University of Porto, Waseda University, Keio-SFC, and others by advising and interacting with PhD and Masters students, including being on the PhD defense committees for two successful PhD defenses.

Joe’s google scholar and dblp web pages can be found at: