technical debt

Unfortunately, many managers don't seem to understand technical debt, causing resistance to revisiting past work.

Going into "technical debt" is often required to survive and drive cash flow.

There is nothing inherently bad about technical debt, just as there is nothing inherently bad in real-world debt.

But there is more to your system than just code and documentation, and these other elements can incur technical debt just as well.

Technical Debt is like a credit card that charges a high interest rate, just leaving the team with an outstanding balance cost.

Technical debt resembles credit card debt: you don't have enough funds at the moment, so you borrow against the future.

The decision to pay down technical debt requires a solid understanding of both the business and technical impacts.

You always have too much technical debt, too many problems, staff members quitting, not enough capital, customer complaints, etc.

future -- we have more features coming and hands-on experience with this code says that the technical debt will only slow us down.

Three common patterns that I see driving exceptions are technical debt, overstuffing the pipe, and misaligned reward structures.

This installment discusses how to estimate for emergent design, and how to make a convincing case for repaying technical debt.

Many AM teams will see these decisions as premature and imposing an unwarranted technical debt.

Complexity arising from the compromises we make that incur technical debt is different.

Technical debt: This refers to the work, which could not be done within the planned Sprint or Iteration.

The problem: the code bases of your projects are accumulating technical debt and they have already started to slowdown.

The hard-to-read code that underlies technical debt also makes it more difficult to find bugs.

We have simply incurred more technical debt than we would like and now is a good time to pay it down.

The second quadrant (prudent and deliberate) is the most common manifestation of technical debt.

Another task that software projects often need time to address is repayment of technical debt.

Next, I'll show two illustrations of technical debt: the first generated by hand and the second using a tool called Sonar.

This would also help the teams avoid the technical debt trap.

In technical debt terms, this means you would tackle the smallest fixes first.

Why do we Accumulate Technical Debt?

This is critical to keeping the technical debt under control and producing high-quality software that is potentially deployable.

High business expectations Low engineering push-back = High technical debt which leads to Low engineering performance

Martin Fowler has written about four quadrants of technical debt (see Resources), as illustrated in Figure 1