Technical debt can accumulate when teams prioritize quickly delivering features over maintaining quality. This leads to slower development and more bugs over time. Automation helps reveal technical debt through continuous integration tests, code inspections, and trend analysis. As teams automate their build, deployment, and testing processes, they often discover previously unknown issues. Both direct testing and the learning from automation efforts help teams understand and address technical debt. Managing technical debt through automation provides benefits at both the team and enterprise levels.

1. How Automation Reveal
Technical Debt
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2. Eric’s Bio
I’m a Lead Consultant at Urbancode
where I helps customers get the
most out of their build, deploy and
release processes. I have 9 years of
automation experience throughout
Eric Minick the application life-cycle in roles as
eric@urbancode.com
@EricMinick a developer, test automation
engineer, and support engineer. I’ve
been at the forefront of CI & CD for
7+ years
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3. Technical Debt
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4. Why do we accumulate technical debt?
• We leverage technical
debt to deliver more
faster.
Scope Time
• De-leveraging is rarely
accounted for in project
planning. Resources
• Green-Shifting*
4 * http://www.drdobbs.com/191600661

5. Why should we care?
Baggage that slows the team Quality issues
• Lack of automated tests • Lack of tests results in
lengthen QA cycles buggier code
• Fear of merging work
• Releases are error prone
and lead to unnecessary
• Unrefactored code slow to
work with outages
• Slow build / deploy processes
delay learning and release
pace
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6. The limits of what we know
• Known Knowns: Bugs confirmed and tracked
• Known Unknowns: Undiscovered bugs
• Unknown unknowns: One of our project
teams is using a GPL’d library making their
product impossible to ship
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7. Where Automation Helps
• “Testing” for debt: Automated tests, code
scans and reports can help identify (and
quantify) problems.
• Automation as a learning experience: The act
of automating brings surprises.
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8. Testing for Debt
• Continuous Integration (multi-component)
• Code Inspection
• Watching Trends
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9. Testing for Debt: Continuous Integration
• On code commit, build and test the software
• Roll up changes to build-time or runtime
dependencies and test those too to identify
API incompatibilities
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10. Testing for Debt: Code Inspection
Code Reviews – Rapidly detect issues
Static Code Analysis – Tool based checks for
bugs, code duplication, code theft, & non-
compliance with dev standards.
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11. Testing for Debt: Code Inspection
Code Reviews – Rapidly detect issues
Static Code Analysis – Tool based checks for
bugs, code duplication, code theft, & non-
compliance with dev standards.
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12. Testing for Debt: Watching Trends
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13. More visualizations: Sonar
13 http://nemo.sonarsource.org/dashboard/index/327690?did=6

14. An example safety net
• Continuous build & unit test
• Nightly slow tests / code scans
• Emails identifying new issues – ideally tied
against source code changes
• Regular inspection of trends
• Bugs / Stories entered around issues
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15. Automation as a learning experience
Implementing the safety net helps us discover
unacknowledged debt
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16. Tests? What tests?
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17. Automation Examples: The Build
• Build time dependencies not understood
• Build scripts missing or incomplete
• “Magic build server” anti-pattern
17 http://www.urbancode.com/html/resources/webinars/Role_of_Binary_repo
sitories_in_Software_Configuration_Management.html

18. Automation Examples: Deployment
• Deployment scripts scarce
• “Special Instructions” with most deployments
indicate non-repeatable process
• Environmental differences handled poorly
• Separation of duties less than real
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19. Automation Example: Test Automation
• Requirements less well understood
• Existing tests are few, stale, un-optimized
• Application not architected for testability
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20. Expect the unexpected when automating
• At scale, Green-Shifting, has hidden issues
• Include these discoveries in ROI estimations
for automation (positively and negatively)
• This is a happy side effect
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21. Direct and Indirect Automation Benefits
• Direct: We tested for problems and found
them.
• Indirect: In attempting to be more
efficient, we automated, and accidently
discovered problems.
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22. Automating for the team
• Provide a “safety net” to detect and recognize
issues.
• Diagnose and repair lack of repeatability in
build-deploy-test
• Quantify accumulating debt in support of
fighting scope creep
• Team level tooling is fine
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23. Automating the Enterprise
• Benefits extend beyond aggregate team level
benefits
• Central Automation and Reporting gets us:
– Identify who can use shared configuration
– Who has tests, who doesn’t
– Who is using what tools
– Build / deploy failure rates
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24. Favorite Examples: Deployment Failures
• Problem: High rate of deployment failures a
problem
• Goal: Reduce failure rate from 40% to 5%
• Approach: Avoid manually fixing a
deployment. Fix the automation and redeploy.
• Enforcement: Monthly / weekly spreadsheet
of success to CIO with a six month plan.
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25. Favorite Examples: “End of Day” Commits
• Problem: Developers commit breaking
changes at the end of the day
• Goal: Avoid other devs staying late to clean up
• Approach: Report on failures, and react to
negative patterns as a team.
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27. Favorite Examples: Low numbers of tests
• Problem: Unit testing discipline breaking
down over time
• Goal: Maintain high or improving coverage
• Approach: Standard coverage tools and an
emphasis on upward trends.
• Enforcement: Trending report
on monitor over CIO’s door
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28. Summary
• We accumulate technical debt as we race to
deliver more, faster.
• This causes us to eventually release
less, slower, with worse quality
• Automation directly and indirectly helps us find
issues.
• There are benefits at both team and enterprise
levels.
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29. More References
http://urbancode.com/resources
• Enterprise CD Maturity Model
• Lean Build & Deployment Automation
• Managing Release Risks with Metrics
Blogs.urbancode.com
Twitter.com/UrbanCodeSoft
Facbebook.com/UrbanCodeSoft
Slideshare.net/Urbancode
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30. Yes, we sell products for this
• AnthillPro
– Build automation and build promotion
• uDeploy
– Deployment and release management
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31. Questions?
eric@urbancode.com
@EricMinick
Slideshare.net/Urbancode
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