From developer pain to impact: establishing large scale refactoring at SAP

Establishing large-scale refactoring at a 100,000+ employee enterprise takes more than a mandate from the top. Harald Aamot, Development Lead at SAP, walks through how the team moved from grassroots developer frustration to a fully backed, org-wide refactoring capability: community workshops that built engineering buy-in, the business case that got finance and executives on board (including cost savings and compliance use cases like PII protection and audit logging), and an InnerSource model that connects central platform teams with product units. He also shares what’s next, from automating onboarding with GitHub Actions and AI to the recipes SAP is building for upcoming Java and Spring Boot upgrades.