Bindings, Platforms, and Innovation
This presentation focuses on the Internet and separating myth from fact, history from the future, and the mundane from the imaginative. Bob Frankston presents a vision of what could and should be.
Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
Posted by Mike Bria on Aug 27, 2008 12:06 PM
A Technical Debt Workshop was recently held to improve our industry's understanding of and approach to "technical debt", resulting in some interesting ideas. Among them, changing our perception of the problem to focus on "assets" rather than "debt", an idea now receiving quite a bit of attention by people such as Michael Feathers and Brian Marick.A successful meeting will identify specific metrics that will bring the discussion of technical debt down to earth. It will also marshal evidence that we're not fooling ourselves when we say that borrowed trouble behaves like borrowed money. (Or better, we prove another dynamic is in play.) It will also state debt management and debt repayment strategies and when they are indicated.The conference aimed to answer these 3 primary questions:
How Java Developers Can Write Great SQL
Effective Management of Static Analysis Vulnerabilities and Defects
Ensuring Code Quality in Multi-threaded Applications
Thanks for the coverage of the workshop. Just to add - 1) Chris Sterling has some (relatively) comprehensive coverage of workshop material listed here: http://chrissterling.gettingagile.com/2008/08/25/the-it-managers-dilemma-with-software-debt/ Obviously, it's hard to distill two days of conference into two or three pages of text, but he makes a strong attempt. Also, we video-recorded the talks (thanks to Agile Alliance Sponsorship) and expect to have them up on youtube within a month. (Volunteer video editors of course). For the latest updates on the workshop, the best place to check is probably my blog: http://xndev.blogspot.com
Technical debt is something I have been looking into for quite a long time. From looking into a whole bunch of software architectures, and unraveling their history, it appears that a lot of it come down to putting the best folks on an unexpected requirement to come up with a "really neat hack". The early payback on this is so great that these developers seem "10 times more productive than the average developer", so we reward hacking, and clap and cheer when folks do it again. Eventually, they are the only folks who can understand their own fragile lattice of hacks, and everybody else backs away from the code. Eventually, even the mental ability of these folks is overwhelmed, and you have a bankrupt hackitecture. Quite a bit of this is written up in a chapter in a book I am in the middle of writing: http://anthony.lauder.googlepages.com/legacysystems
(1) lack of self discpline (2) impatience/hurry (3) ignorance. I have done a good prototype with exciting features. Then, I felt exhausted and even a bit disgusted with my own code. Heavy debts make the product ungly. You may read more at http://ethicminds.blogspot.com/
Technical debt is either (1) "unknown unknown" or (2) bad YAGNI(You Aint Gonna Need It), as opposed to good/official YAGNI, or clear YAGNI. See more at http://ethicminds.blogspot.com/2008/09/technical-debt-in-plain-english.html
This presentation focuses on the Internet and separating myth from fact, history from the future, and the mundane from the imaginative. Bob Frankston presents a vision of what could and should be.
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