Taming Technical Debt is not that hard, communication part is the harder one

1. Taming Tech Debt 🔥💸
4 March 2022 - Panji Gautama

2. Taming Tech Debt 🔥💸
1. Demystifying
Tech Debt &
Impact on our
Team
1 1. Managing &
Prioritizing
Tech Debt
2 1. Embracing Tech
Debt on Legacy &
New System
3

3. How I honed my tech debt taming skills
Panji Gautama
github.com/rhapsodixx
CTO, 5+ product verticals
HoE, 4+ product verticals
VPe, 3+ product verticals
SVP, 6+ product verticals
CTO, early stage
Stealth Startup

4. Demystifying Tech Debt & Impact on our Team
The True Meaning of Tech Debt

5. Demystifying Tech Debt & Impact on our Team
Tech Debt as Disagreement
natural result of writing code
about something we don't have a
proper understanding of.

6. Demystifying Tech Debt & Impact on our Team
Root Cause of Tech Debt
󰝊
constant changes
software exists in a world of uncertainty
software entropy
market opportunities
new cyber threats
obsolete technology
employee turnover
󰳒
wrong design
wrong problem statement
solution doesn’t fit business requirements
poor nonfunctional requirements (NFRs)
poor technical skills
engineering wisdom
ownership

7. Demystifying Tech Debt & Impact on our Team
󰳒 Wrong Design : Sweet Spot
https://refactoring.fm/p/the-true-meaning-of-technical-debt

8. Demystifying Tech Debt & Impact on our Team
󰳒 Wrong Design : Over Engineering
Effective Problem Statement
YAGNI
KISS
Worse is Better

9. Demystifying Tech Debt & Impact on our Team
󰳒 Wrong Design : Ownership
Ownership is leading
indicator of engineering
health

10. Demystifying Tech Debt & Impact on our Team
󰳒 Wrong Design : Spectrum

11. Demystifying Tech Debt & Impact on our Team
󰳒 Wrong Design : Conway’s Law

12. Demystifying Tech Debt & Impact on our Team
󰳒 Wrong Design : Team Topology

13. Demystifying Tech Debt & Impact on our Team
󰝊 Constant Changes
software exists in a world of
uncertainty
https://refactoring.fm/p/the-true-meaning-of-technical-debt

14. Demystifying Tech Debt & Impact on our Team
󰝊 Constant Changes

15. Demystifying Tech Debt & Impact on our Team
󰝊 Constant Changes

16. Demystifying Tech Debt & Impact on our Team
󰝊 Constant Changes
support Guided,
Incremental Change across
Multiple Dimensions

17. Demystifying Tech Debt & Impact on our Team
Impact based on Surveys
52%+ of engineers believe that technical debt negatively impacts their
team’s morale
60%+ of engineers think that tech debt causes bugs, outages, and slows
down the development process
66%+ believe the team would ship up to 100% faster if they had a process
for technical debt
58%+ of companies still have no process for managing technical debt.
Engineers spend 42%+ of their time fixing past rather than building the
future

18. Demystifying Tech Debt & Impact on our Team
Impact based on Surveys
By 2024, global technical debt that has not been remediated will double
totalling $4 trillion
Through 2022, I&O leaders that actively manage and reduce technical
debt will achieve at least 50% faster service delivery times to the
business
- gartner
Engineers spend ~33% of their time dealing with technical debt which
crushes team morale and cost companies ~$85Bn/Year - stripe

19. Demystifying Tech Debt & Impact on our Team
Compounding Impact

20. Demystifying Tech Debt & Impact on our Team
Compounding Impact

21. Managing & Prioritizing Tech Debt
Technical Debt Shouldn’t Be Avoided

22. Managing & Prioritizing Tech Debt
Not All Debt is Created Equal
🟢
Small
● Missing Unit Test
● Remove Redundancy by
Abstraction
● Missing Code
Conventions
🟡
Medium
● Automate Manual process
● Adjust performance of a
small service that’s been
degrading over time
● Improve CI/CD pipeline
deploy time
🔴
Large
● Refactoring a large piece
of legacy code to enable
product improvements
● Migrate a service to new
library / framework
● Rework infrastructure to
improve reliability and
performance.

23. Managing & Prioritizing Tech Debt
🟢 Small Debt
always leave the code better than you found it
- robert c martin

24. Managing & Prioritizing Tech Debt
🟡 Medium Debt
allocated fixed time on every
sprint
consider how much time PM
spend research on feature, do
same for tech debt

25. Managing & Prioritizing Tech Debt
🔴 Large Debt
Engage stakeholders as
part of Quarterly Plan as
Business Decision

26. Managing & Prioritizing Tech Debt
How to Spot Tech Debt
👾 Bugs
♻ Customer Feedback
🚨 SRE Metrics/Golden Signals (Latency, Error, Traffic, Saturation)
󰝊 Project Management (Story Points, Lead Time, MTTR)
🧋Code Quality (Static Code Analyzer, Security Management)
https://panjigautama.com/engineering-north-star-metrics/

27. Embracing Tech Debt on Legacy & New System
Debt as Business Investment

28. Embracing Tech Debt on Legacy & New System
Technical Debt Quadrant

29. Embracing Tech Debt on Legacy & New System
Debt as a Business Issue, not a Tech Problem

30. Embracing Tech Debt on Legacy & New System
Prioritization Framework

31. Embracing Tech Debt on Legacy & New System
Prioritization Framework

32. Taming Tech Debt 🔥💸
● Tech Debt is Inevitable, Embrace it Gracefully
● Shared understanding of tech debt across Organization
● Proactively identify and track technical debt, make it visible
● Tech debt as a business issue, not a technology problem
● Tech debt as part of Product Prioritization Framework
● Avoid a big-bang approach to pay down all debt, use budget wisely
Tips: Speak to non-technical stakeholders using business terms
e.g. In the last three months we spent 42% of our development time on bug fixing, costing us 1M$ USD

33. thank you
linkedin.com/in/panjigautama