Straight Talk on Technical Debt
Posted By admin on February 15, 2011 | Technical Debt
The intensity and speed of Agile development puts a premium on satisfying the functional requirements of business users. But this intense focus comes at the expense of structural quality.
Can we measure this effect? Indeed. We can do it by calculating the technical debt accrued during the Agile development process.
And once we quantify technical debt we can begin to ask questions like “how much technical debt is too much?”
On February 17th, in San Francisco, Jim Highsmith, executive consultant for ThoughtWorks, and yours truly will host a session on technical debt. We’ll cover the following topics:
- Are we measuring the right metrics in Agile?
- How is technical debt measured in Agile?
- What are the financial implications of technical debt?
- How can we use technical debt to make the right tradeoffs between delivery speed today and cost of maintenance tomorrow?
Click here to register!
EVENT DETAILS
Date: Thursday, February 17th
Time: 6:00 p.m. -8:00 p.m.
Location: The Palace Hotel, San Francisco, CA
Tags: Agile, Jim Highsmith, structural quality, Technical debt
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3 Responses to “Straight Talk on Technical Debt”
Regarding
“Agile development puts a premium on satisfying the functional requirements of business users. But this intense focus comes at the expense of structural quality.”
I fundamentally disagree with this assertion that agile development’s focus on delivering client value leads inexorably to poor quality.
Humble suggestion that you could re-word it and still have the impact that you are looking for. For example:
“Our industry is woefully incapable of balancing time to market of features with code design and quality. Just how should we trade-off technical debt with delivery of features? Can we even measure technical debt?”
Intensity and speed at the expense of structural quality doesn’t resonate with me in the context of agile. It has been my experience that good agile practices reduce or at least manage cruft and keep it at very low levels.
That said, Jim is a sharp guy and I am confident this session will be loaded with good information about how to assess and manage cruft (or technical debt if you want to call it that).
- Doc