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Architecture & Design

What Does Technical Debt Tell You?

Technical debt is a popular metaphor for communicating the long-term implications of architectural decisions and trade-offs to stakeholders, but there are limitations to its usefulness. Incorporating quality attribute requirements, or using a different metaphor such as deferred maintenance, can help improve decision making.

Kurt Bittner Pierre Pureur
on Dec 02, 2022 1
Culture & Methods

Code Red: the Business Impact of Code Quality

Everyone in the software industry “knows” that code quality is important, yet we never had any data or numbers to prove it. In this article, we explore the impact by diving into recent research on code quality. With twice the development speed, 15 times fewer bugs, and a significant reduction of uncertainty in completion times, the business advantage of code quality is unmistakably clear.

Adam Tornhill
on Oct 17, 2022
Culture & Methods

Talking Like a Suit - Communicating the Importance of Engineering Work in Business Terms

This article explores how to construct engineering work as a story, including clearly presenting a problem, offering a solution, and showing the business a path to success that solves their problem and avoids failure. By presenting your case in this way, you significantly increase your chances of getting these engineering problems addressed, while also becoming a better partner for the business.

David Van Couvering
on Feb 08, 2022
Culture & Methods

Managing Technical Debt in a Microservice Architecture

At QCon Plus, Glenn Engstrand described how Optum Digital engineering devised a method for reliably and predictably paying down tech debt for hundreds of microservices, forming relevant communities and identifying high-risk areas. The communities' collective decisions can be compiled into an actionable roadmap and presented to product managers in a systemic and non-confrontational way.

Glenn Engstrand
on Feb 02, 2022
Culture & Methods

Avoiding Technical Bankruptcy: a Whole-Organization Perspective on Technical Debt

Technical debt is not primarily caused by clumsy programming, and hence we cannot hope to fix it by more skilled programming alone. Rather, technical debt is a third-order effect of poor communication. What we observe and label “technical debt” is the by-product of a dysfunctional process. To fix the problem of accumulating technical debt, we need to fix this broken process.

Einar Høst
on Dec 24, 2021 5
Culture & Methods

Technical Debt Isn't Technical: What Companies Can Do to Reduce Technical Debt

In this article, three experts discuss some of the key findings of the “State of Technical Debt 2021” report including the impact of technical debt on engineering teams, the pros and cons of dealing with maintenance work continuously, the future of technical debt and what each engineering teams can do to communicate the importance of dealing with technical debt to companies’ leadership.

Alex Omeyer Nicolas Carlo Maarten Dalmijn
on Sep 08, 2021 1
Culture & Methods

Improving Testability: Removing Anti-Patterns through Joint Conversations

Code is always testable, but the cost may be high, and the effort exhausting. We can change code to be highly testable by identifying anti-patterns and fixing them. And developers can make the code fit the test requirements, by having discussions with the testers who actually test it.

Gil Zilberfeld
on Aug 10, 2021
Culture & Methods

‘Debt’ as a Guide on the Agile Journey: Technical Debt

In this article in a series on how ‘debt’ can be used to guide an agile journey, we will provide two examples of smells that are related to technical debt, explain the symptoms, the impact on the business and in our organization, outline the experiments (countermeasures) that we have introduced in an effort to try to remove the smell, and provide some specific advice for you to be inspired.

Anne Abell Carsten Ruseng Jakobsen Rasmus Lund-Jensen
on Jun 18, 2021
Culture & Methods

Signs You’re in a Death Spiral (and How to Turn It around before It’s Too Late)

Don’t let feature work blind you. Enterprises are ramping up their software delivery to compete in the digital-first world. But more features and faster time-to-market can lead your business into a death spiral if you neglect technical debt and risk work. Learn how to use value stream metrics to identify whether your business is in danger and how to reverse the trajectory before it’s too late.

Lee Reid Patrick Anderson
on Apr 13, 2021
Culture & Methods

Using OKRs to Build Autonomous Impact Teams

To focus on outcomes rather than outputs, Meilleurs Agents uses the Objective and Key Results framework to align the whole company on what they want to achieve. Christopher Parola and Nicolas Baron gave a presentation at FlowCon France 2019 where they showed how they implemented the OKR method and turned their product and tech teams into impact teams.

Ben Linders Christopher Parola Nicolas Baron
on Jan 31, 2020
Culture & Methods

Categorise Unsolved Problems in Agile Development: Premature & Foreseeable

Productivity decline and technical debt, as often seen in agile development, can be prevented by separating unsolved problems into premature and foreseeable. It shifts the discussion about unsolved problems from importance to likelihood. With small but essential adjustments, agile can be kept sustainable. With this insight, developer-architect differences and team psychology gaps can be bridged.

Bas Groot
on Oct 25, 2019
Culture & Methods

Q&A on the Book Managing Technical Debt

The book Managing Technical Debt by Philippe Kruchten, Robert Nord, and Ipek Ozkaya provides principles and practices that help you gain control of technical debt throughout the software development process and life of the software product.

Ben Linders Philippe Kruchten Robert Nord Ipek Ozkaya
on Sep 30, 2019