Technical debt management strategies involve measuring all aspects of development including code quality, productivity, and the development pipeline. It is important to control increasing technical debt in new code by fixing leaks through code reviews and pull request checks. Existing technical debt should be prioritized and fixed based on categories like architectural debt and testing debt. Large codebases can be managed productively using continuous integration and delivery pipelines, automatic rollbacks, pull request reminders, and refactors/clean ups assisted by tools.

1. Technical Debt Management Strategies
Raquel Pau Fernandez
Twitter: @raquelpau
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2. a little bit about me
• Product Manager @ Cloudbees (ex @Schibsted)
• More than 10 years of experience in Java
• Research background in software engineering.
• Walkmod project leader
• Speaker at several occasions
• EMBA @ ESADE
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twitter: @raquelpau

3. Software is eating the world
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4. Companies compete for a global market
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5. Product market fit - building a MVP
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7. What does technical debt mean?
Technical debt (also known as design debt or code
debt) is "a concept in programming that reflects the
extra development work that arises when code that is
easy to implement in the short run is used instead of
applying the best overall solution"
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8. is the technical debt evitable?
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9. How do you measure productivity?
Productivity = |Features| / unit of time
Feature = refactor + test + code + build + review
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10. and as a result..
the code becomes our own
specification
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11. But after gaining traction.. we find bugs
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12. And then... appeared the
ROI (Return of Investment) =
gross profit – expenses
investment
technical debt costeconomical benefit
of our features
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13. But after gaining traction..
Productivity = |Features|+|Bugs| / unit of time
Feature = refactor + test + code + build + review
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14. How to manage the tech debt now?
(without stopping new features, of course)
Sprint = |Features| + |Bugs| + |Improvements|
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15. Technical deb management strategies
1. Measure all: It is NOT only about our quality standards
(code), it is about how fast I continue delivering it and make
it work.
2. Fix the leak: Control not increasing it in new code.
3. Prioritize and fix previous technical debt.
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16. 1. Measure all: code quality
• Code Changes (e.g Git)
• Successful builds (e.g Cloudbees CI)
• Test Coverage (e.g Cobertura).
• Use linters (e.g PMD, Checkstyle…)
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17. 1. Measure all: your development pipeline
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18. 2. Fix the leak - the modern approach
• Pull Request Checks:
• Code Coverage Tools
• Static Code Analysis Tools
• Code Review
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19. 2. Fix the leak - a legacy approach
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source: http://blog.crisp.se/2013/10/11/henrikkniberg/good-and-bad-technical-debt

20. 3. Prioritize: technical debt categories
• Architectural debt (refactor) – continuous refactoring
• Testing debt (test) – continuous integration
• Code standards debt (code) – continuous inspection
• Infrastructure debt (build) – continuous delivery
• Knowledge debt (review) – continuous formation (?)
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Tech Debt Velocity Simplicity Weight
Architectural 3 3 9
Testing 4 1 4
Standards 1 4 4
Infrastructure 5 5 25
Knowledge 2 2 4
3. Prioritize: technical debt planning

22. 3. Prioritize: components planning
source: https://tech.ticketmaster.com/author/simontarry76/
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23. 4. Becoming productive: large codebases
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24. • Release:
• CI + CD Pipelines
• Automatic Rollbacks
• Reviews:
• Pull Requests Reminder
• Refactors/Clean Ups:
• Dependency Updates
• Automatic FixUps
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4. Becoming productive: tooling

25. Take home messages
• MVPs - “viable” does not mean without quality.
• Measure, fix the leak and prioritize what else to fix.
• Use tools for measure and control technical debt.
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26. Questions
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