XConf Europe 2025 in Madrid | Sep 18

For more than a decade, XConf by Thoughtworks has been our flagship event for technologists, by technologists who care deeply about software and its impact on the world. This year we’re heading to vibrant Madrid, where, much like XConf, rich history meets modern innovation, offering the perfect backdrop for inspiring conversations and ideas.
Tickets are now available via Eventbrite! Get yours now.
About the conference
Thursday, 9:00am - 5:30pm CET
What is XConf:
With its relaxed atmosphere and focus on high-quality topics and talks, XConf offers a unique opportunity to connect with like-minded technologists. It’s a space to explore bold ideas, challenge yourself with fresh perspectives and deepen your understanding of the role technology plays in solving real-world problems. Like catching up with old friends at a class reunion, XConf combines familiarity and inspiration in a way that leaves a lasting impact.
Why you should attend:
Actionable insight: XConf is built on Thoughtworks’ and our clients’ years of experience tackling complex problems across industries and markets, so you’ll leave with practical insights you can use right away.
Deep technical knowledge: For more than 30 years, Thoughtworks has been at the forefront of technological innovation, introducing practices like continuous delivery, data mesh, microservices, infrastructure as code and AI-first software delivery. XConf brings together the technologists who shape these innovations to share what works, what doesn’t and what’s next.
A diverse lineup: XConf celebrates diversity with the target of a 50/50 gender split among our speakers. This ensures a balance of perspectives and insights from a broad range of backgrounds and experiences.
Check out the agenda below. Stay tuned as we announce our exclusive keynote soon.
Who should attend?
Whether you’re a software engineer, developer, architect or a technologist passionate about using technology to create real impact, XConf is for you. This event is for professionals and engineers who are shaping strategies, driving innovation and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with technology. You’ll join a diverse group of global technologists and decision-makers, all focused on the intersection of technology, business and societal impact.
XConf Europe 2025 | Madrid, September 18
Agenda and talks
9.30
Welcome by hosts
9.45
Keynote to be announced soon
10.45
Break 15 min

Track 1
11:00
Incremental modernization through CodeConcise
Alessio Ferri and Jonathan Passé
In today’s competitive market, legacy systems often hinder the rapid delivery of products and services that align with evolving customer expectations. As a result, legacy modernization is not only more critical–but also more urgent–than ever. Join us to explore how we are using a combination of deterministic techniques and AI to identify the core business capabilities buried within legacy systems. By uncovering “seams” in the code, we decompose modernization into manageable “thin slices” that can be delivered incrementally. This approach democratises modernization by providing continuous value and feedback throughout the journey–rather than deferring ROI until the end of a multi-year transformation programme.
11:55
AI in action: Boost productivity and deliver business value with practical tools
Sara Michelazzo
Thoughtworks is undergoing a bold AI transformation, integrating tools like Gemini, NotebookLM, and Agentic AI to boost both individual and enterprise productivity. In this session, we’ll share hands-on experiences - what worked, what didn’t, and how we’re navigating change. Expect live demos of AI-augmented workflows in Sales and Knowledge Management, including intelligent research for account planning, strategic meeting prep, and rapid proposal creation. We’ll also unpack our adoption strategies. Designed for practitioners and leaders alike, this talk offers practical lessons, adoption tactics, and clear impact metrics - ideal for anyone looking to integrate AI into daily workflows and drive real business value.
12:50
Streaming: Real-time architecture for connected products in automotive
Baran Demir
Data-intensive systems demand architectures that can seamlessly handle real-time access and scalability. This talk dives deep into the technical execution of building such a system, focusing on a practical example from the automotive domain. We’ll present a scalable streaming solution designed for real-time data access, powered by event-driven microservices and MQTT for efficient, lightweight communication. The architecture integrates secure APIs and robust access control mechanisms to balance performance, security, and usability. Throughout the session, we’ll share the technical challenges we faced, the lessons learned along the way, and the tools and strategies that helped us deliver a reliable, future-ready solution.

Track 2
11:00
The paradox of TDD and pairing: Why it's so difficult but so worthwhile
Paola Reyes Montalvo
This talk takes a candid look at the real-world experience of adopting Test-Driven Development (TDD) and pair programming. Drawing on a six-year personal journey, we'll discuss the initial frustrations of reshaping coding habits, the significant mental shifts required and the eventual rewards of these practices. You'll hear practical strategies to overcome common challenges, along with real-world examples of how TDD and pairing lead to more robust, maintainable code and stronger team collaboration. By the end, you'll leave with actionable steps to transform coding from an individual challenge into a shared, empowering success.
11:55
Is clean code dead?
Sarah Schmid
In today’s fast-paced development world, conversations about clean code have become rare, but is it really less important? This talk is a reminder of why "good" code quality still matters, simple ideas to write better code and how to encourage others. Let’s bring clean code back onto the table.
12:50
Enabling enterprises for generative AI agents
Fabian Nonnenmacher
Many organizations are integrating generative AI tools in an ad-hoc manner, missing the opportunity to build a strategic, unified capability. This talk offers a blueprint for enterprises ready to unlock the full potential of generative AI agents. We'll delve into the essential platform capabilities needed to support the entire agent lifecycle, from service creation and deployment to robust evaluations and fine-tuning. This platform empowers product teams to organically create and share AI tools and agents, enriching existing offerings and making them discoverable company-wide. We'll also spotlight the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and show how it allows various AI agents to work together seamlessly throughout your organization. To round things out, we'll tackle the enterprise challenges you can't ignore – security, auditing and practical governance that enables rather than blocks innovation.
Lunch break 55 min

14:30
Context-aware policy authoring for Terraform: Generating OPA policies with an MCP server
Óscar Cobles Montes
As developers use AI agents to generate Terraform configurations, ensuring compliance with internal policies becomes a critical challenge. This talk presents a new approach: Integrating an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that connects AI agents with existing OPA (Open Policy Agent) policies. By querying these policies, the server extracts real-time constraints, such as allowed instance types, required tags or open ports, and feeds them back into the generation prompt. This allows developers to request infrastructure in natural language (“I need a server on AWS”) and receive compliant Terraform code by default. The session includes a prototype demo and explores how this pattern bridges policy, AI and Infrastructure as Code inside modern developer workflows.
15:25
Fighting the big ball of mud with business capability mapping
Jen Wallace
Are your systems drifting into a "big ball of mud"? In this talk, I’ll show how business capability mapping can uncover and resolve unclear domain boundaries in large, multi-team projects, without disrupting progress. I’ll share how we applied this approach across 10+ teams to gain alignment, reduce complexity and keep our architecture clean and scalable. Walk away with practical techniques to break free from architectural chaos, keep your teams aligned and your projects on track.
16:20
“Port & Mend" over rewrite - Reducing the cost and risk of dealing with legacy code
Matteo Vaccari
Many legacy rewrite projects fall short of expectations, while the old systems still keep the business afloat. A practical alternative is to "port & mend" the legacy code. This involves minimal changes to adapt it to new platforms and technology ("porting") and giving it care through fixes, refactoring and testing ("mending"). The result? Maintainable, deployable and updatable code. While rewrites have their place, porting and mending are often less risky, more affordable and now even more accessible with advances in AI. This talk draws on real-world experience to explore the value and practicality of this approach.

14:30
Pairing with the machine: How AI agents are rewriting the rules of software development
Satish Kumar Nadarajan
What if your coding partner could understand your codebase, remember architectural decisions, and adapt to your workflow? This talk explores how autonomous AI agents are transforming software development by acting as intelligent pair programmers. Beyond tools like GitHub Copilot, these agents can analyze project context, suggest design improvements, recall team decisions, and participate in architectural debates. We'll cover key technologies like LLMs, memory systems, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and tool orchestration, with real-world VSCode prototypes. We'll also tackle challenges like hallucinations, dependency drift, and trust. Whether you're an engineer, tech lead, or platform builder, this talk reveals how AI-native development is becoming your newest teammate.
15:25
Training without sharing: Is federated learning the answer to data privacy in AI?
Emma Manna Loyarte
In sectors like healthcare, data is abundant but often unusable due to strict privacy regulations. Federated learning offers a promising solution: training models locally on sensitive data and sharing only the learned parameters, not the data itself. This talk introduces the core concepts behind federated learning and explores its practical potential and limitations. Within the scope of natural language processing, detecting domain-specific medical terms in patient records, we will examine how federated approaches can benefit from sensitive datasets without compromising privacy. Through a series of performed experiments, we’ll highlight the strengths and limitations of federated learning, as well as learnings that can help assessing its suitability for other use cases.
16:20
Application-driven infrastructure
Kief Morris
Even with automated delivery pipelines, cloud and infrastructure as code, managing environments and infrastructure is often a major drag for software delivery effectiveness. This talk describes an approach to building infrastructure as composable components that application teams can provision and configure themselves, changing the dynamic away from ticket-driven infrastructure silos.
Catch the XConf vibes
What is XConf?
Thoughtworkers and guest presenters share how technologists and business leaders foster growth, collaboration and innovation to make an impact on clients, society and the tech industry.
Highlights XConf Europe 2024
Last year XConf took place in Barcelona and brought together technologist from all over Europe. Watch the highlights.
Talks from 2024
Past keynote speakers

Rebecca Parsons
Former CTO, Thoughtworks

Martin Fowler
Chief Scientist, Thoughtworks

Emily Gorcenski
Former Head of Data Europe, Thoughtworks

Trisha Gee
Java Champion, author and internationally recognized speaker