Making technical debt visible … Making technical debt visible already proves to be quite a challenge, as it’s all about exposing the underwater part of the iceberg. But how deep underwater does it go? To know for sure, you would need the right diving equipment. To go just below the surface, you would start with a snorkel. But to go far down, you need a deep-sea exploration submersible.
Tag Archives: Technical debt
Remediation cost versus risk level: Two sides of the same coin?
While working in a CISQ technical work group to propose the “best” quality model that would efficiently provide visibility on application quality (mostly to ensure their reliance, performance, and security), we discussed two approaches that would output exposure. The first is a remediation cost approach, which measures the distance to the required internal quality level. The other is a risk level approach, which estimates the impact internal quality issues can have on the business. Although both are based on the same raw data, the information differs when we identify situations that do not comply with some coding, structural, and architectural practices. The former approach will estimate the cost to fix … Read More
Is Every Part of the Application equal when Assessing the Risk Level?
Risk detection is about identifying any threat that can negatively and severely impact the behavior of applications in operations, as well as the application maintenance and development activity. Then, risk assessment is about conveying the result of the detection through easy-to-grasp pieces of information. Part of this activity is about highlighting what it is you’re seeing while summarizing a plethora of information. But as soon as we utter the word “summarizing,” we risk losing some important context. Application split impact as a strength in risk assessment An application can be considered as a whole in its purpose of servicing one area of the business, yet it is composed of multiple … Read More
Surviving the IT Perfect Storm
The economy, the complexity and pace of business, and an ongoing lack of resources have created a perfect storm for IT departments worldwide. As wave after wave of IT failures litter the press, there’s no question that the storm is here. In its wake, businesses are faltering, careers are shattering, and stockholders are left wondering “How could this happen … again?” The key to preventing your business and career from landing on the rocks is the aggressive identification and elimination of risk. This document provides some tactics designed to identify risks across vast application portfolios and eliminate risk within critical business systems. Red sky at morning, sailor take warning With … Read More
Don’t Blame the Outsourcer
In my travels, I run into a lot of organizations that are not happy with the performance of their outsourcer. In many cases, the core relationship is the result of a cascade effect. The organization delivered an application that had poor structural quality to begin with, and left the outsourcer with the difficult task of meeting their SLA requirements with a faulty application. If you want great results from an outsourcer, here’s job one: make sure the application you’re delivering is structurally sound to begin with. Step two: make sure the tools and technologies you use to ensure structural integrity are also part of the outsourcing agreement and, in the … Read More
Fast or Nimble? Agile Should be Both
I was watching the gymnastics competition at the Olympics on Sunday night and on more than one occasion heard commentators applaud competitors for their agility. As I watched these gymnasts move swiftly and with exacting precision across the beam, floor, vault and bars, I could not help but marvel at their abilities and at how appropriate a descriptor “agile” was for them. Long before businesses tossed around the term “Agile” as a method of technology project management, it stood as a word that often affixed to people and objects that displayed a certain set of characteristics. People earning the moniker “agile” almost invariably were both fast and nimble – not … Read More
Mozzilla Thinks Crashes are a GOOD Thing…Really?
My six-year-old can tie her own shoes. I honestly did not realize how big of a deal that was until her teacher told me a few months ago that she had, for a short time, become the designated shoe tier in her classroom. Apparently, thanks to the advent of Velcro closures for kids’ shoes, nobody else in her kindergarten class knew how to tie their shoes. The problem with being a “star” of your kindergarten class, however, is that all the kids want their shoes tied by her. As a result, she was trying to tie shoes very fast – too fast, in fact – and started making mistakes, which … Read More