Agile on The Beach 2022 How to get out of (technical) Debt Sally Goble

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How to get out of (technical) debt
AOTB2022

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Tech Debt: the elephant in the room

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How to get out of (technical) debt

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In debt
● What technical debt is, and why it occurs
● Some examples of technical debt
● How do you know you’re in debt?
Out of debt
● How to pay back your debt
● Managing repayments
● How to avoid accumulating more debt by creating good habits

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Me

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Accurx

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In debt
What is Technical Debt
Some examples of Technical Debt
How do you know you’re in debt?

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In debt
What is Technical Debt?

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“Technical Debt is the implied cost of
additional rework caused by choosing
an easy (limited) solution now instead of
using a better approach that would take
longer”

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Even faster pace means more debt!

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Fast ≠ Bad

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Reckless Prudent
Inadvertent
Deliberate
“Ship now and
deal with the
consequences!”
“What’s layering?” “Now we know
how we should
have done it”
“We don’t have
time for design”

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In debt
What is Technical Debt
Some examples of Technical Debt

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Code or Application debt

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Design or Architecture debt

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Testing debt

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Tooling debt

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Reliability or performance debt

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Knowledge / skills debt

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In debt
What is Technical Debt
Some examples of Technical Debt
How do you know you’re in debt?

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“One unit test took me three days to
write…”
Leon

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“We don’t have time to address
technical debt so I add two days on
for each feature so I can do some
refactoring as I go along”
Anna

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“Product Y stopped working when
the team shipped a new feature in
Product X!”
Kristina

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“He doesn’t want to work in team X
because then he’d have to work with
all that ‘spaghetti’ code”
Sally

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Technical debt is a business problem
not a tech problem!

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● Speed of delivery slows down
● Your reputation is tarnished
● You experience attrition

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Out of debt
How to pay back your debt
Managing repayments
How to avoid accumulating debt

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Out of debt
How to pay back your debt

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Face up to all
the debt you’re in

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Technical Debt Investment
Technical Debt

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Out of debt
How to pay back your debt
Managing repayments

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Manage your repayments
● One off repayments
● Dedicated teams
● Ad hoc repayments
● Sustainable repayments

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One off
repayments:
AKA
The debt bash
● We’re all in it together!
● Cross team collaboration
● Can get a fair bit done
● Can only do it sporadically

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Dedicated
teams
● Doesn’t interrupt delivery
● No context switching
● Can deliver bigger pieces of
TI
● Nobody wants to do it!
● Uses your senior engineers
● Engineers don’t get
exposure to the pain points
● Contractors don’t know the
of the code

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Ad hoc
repayments
● Flexible and efficient
● Cross team collaboration
● Product delivery trumps all
● Schedule clashes
● Lack of transparency
● Some tech debt too big

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Sustainable
repayments

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● Got buy in!
● Embedded in teams
● Empowered teams to deliver
● Celebrated success

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Get buy in!

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Convinced our senior leadership
● Described problem in business language
● Showed the scale of the problem

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● Engineering time budget
Agreed how much time

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Bring PMs on the journey
● Reduced product scope to 90%
● Won’t overload critical projects
● Iterated
● Over-communicated

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Embed

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TI ‘Cycle’ Planning
● Get the right people in the room
● Prioritise the work
● Size a cycle’s worth of work

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Matching TI to teams, consider
● Urgent delivery deadlines
● Skill in teams
● Alignment with teams
● Development goals/interests
● (Sense checked with PMs/TLs!)

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Empower

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Trust your teams

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Hold them to account

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Celebrate!

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Bring Investment out of the shadows
● Celebrating visibly

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Has it worked? ● We’ve managed to get
through a fair bit
● Teams embraced it!
● Engineers don’t feel guilty
● Transparency
● Career progression
● Feels a bit top down
● Mid cycle moves

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Out of debt
How to pay back your debt
Managing repayments
How to avoid accumulating debt

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Good habits
● Be aware of compromises
● Document your trade offs
● Use lean UX methods
● Invest in knowledge
● Upgrade technologies
● Keep updating your TI list!
● Reward continuous
improvement

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Conclusion
● What technical debt is, and how it is inevitable
● Some examples of technical debt
● Visible manifestations of tech debt and how to spot it
● Business impact of tech debt (slow to market,
unreliable, attrition)
● Sustainable ways of reducing it (backlog, incorporate
in teams, in SLDC)

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Treat technical debt as a business
problem not a tech problem

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Thank you!
(we’re hiring)

57. Resources
https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TechnicalDebt.html
https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TechnicalDebtQuadrant.html
http://wiki.c2.com/?TechnicalDebt
https://medium.com/@learnstuff.io/broken-window-theory-in-software-development-bef627a1ce99
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0950584917305098
https://tech.ticketmaster.com/2015/06/30/what-ticketmaster-is-doing-about-technical-debt/
https://philippe.kruchten.com/2017/02/14/concrete-things-you-can-do-about-your-technical-debt/