The mythical technical debt. (Brooke, please, forgive me)

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The mythical technical debt
Brooke, please, forgive me
Roberto.Bettazzoni@agile42.com

Agenda
● What is technical debt?
● Why does tech debt matter?
● Why can technical debt be a threat and an
opportunity?
● How turn technical debt into an opportunity?
● How to deal with technical debt?
● Q&A

What is technical debt?
“Shipping first-time code is like going into debt.
A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back
promptly with refactoring.
The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid."
Ward Cunningham, OOPSLA 1992

“In software-intensive systems, technical debt is a collection of design
or implementation constructs that are expedient in the short term, but
set up a technical context that can make future changes more costly or
impossible. Technical debt presents an actual or contingent liability
whose impact is limited to internal system qualities, primarily
maintainability and evolvability.”
“Managing technical debt in software engineering” Dagstuhl Seminar 16162 - 2016

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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt (2016)

Technical debt describes the consequences of software
development actions that intentionally or unintentionally
prioritize client value and/or project constraints such as
delivery deadlines, over more technical implementation, and
design considerations.
“Measuring And Managing Technical Debt” - Forbes, Aug 2022

Tech debt is the oﬀ-balance-sheet accumulation of all the
technology work a company needs to do in the future.
Tech debt: Reclaiming tech equity - McKinsey Digital, Oct 2020

What is NOT technical debt?
● Bad code, bugs
● Ignorance, lack of skills
● Operating costs, maintenance, life cycle, amortization plan
● Low-quality services
● Cancel or defer the building of a feature

https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TechnicalDebtQuadrant.html

● Intentional (deliberate)
○ short-term debt - e.g. credit card
○ long-term debt - e.g. house mortgage
● Unintentional (inadvertent)
○ Accidental
○ Inevitable

Why does tech debt matter?
The Developer Coeﬀicient, Stripe 2018
Gartner predicts, “Through 2023, I&O leaders who actively
manage and reduce technical debt will achieve at least 50%
faster service delivery times to the business.”
Multiple studies estimate the average organization wastes
23%-42% of their development time on technical debt.
A McKinsey study describes one company that estimates the cost of their tech
debt as anywhere between 15%-60% of every dollar spent on IT, which is not
accounted for in their business cases.
Source: Measuring And Managing Technical Debt , Forbes 2022

Why does tech debt matter?

Why do agility and tech debt go hand in hand?
By design
● Agility to grasp market opportunities by taking on some technical debt.
● Short-cuts, easy/limited solution to experiment with design.
● By shipping faster we get customer feedback early and can inspect & adapt
accordingly.
● VUCA - Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity

Technical debt as a threat vs. opportunity

How turn technical debt into an opportunity?

Information to visualize tech debt
Origin (Why?)
Dimension (Linear/Complex)
Cost of delay (Risk/urgency)
Location (Where?)
Dependencies (Causes/eﬀects)

Origin of tech debt
● Business or development or technological choices or shortcuts
● Lack of time or resources or knowledge
● Short-term vision for the architecture/design
● Neglecting maintenance
● Changes in standards or regulations.
● New technologies, new environments, new markets.
● Company mergers or acquisitions that integrate external systems.
Intentional - Unintentional - Ineluctable - f(time)

Information on tech debt
Tech debt dimension:
● estimation of the cost/time/complexity needed to pay the Tech Debt now.
● The unit of measure could be the same as the team uses to estimate the user
stories (or tasks)
The profile of the cost of delay is the major increment factor in the tech debt, so it is
essential.

Information on tech debt
The location could be expressed in a relative way to the type of tech debt.
● business / functionality (i.e. Apple Pay service customised for store X )
● architectural / design (i.e. duplicated DB tables)
● code / data / frameworks / tools
…
List of dependencies (also between diﬀerent tech debts).

Share all your tech debt
● Map your deliberate tech debt on a backlog or board
● Order by urgency / complexity / risk / cost of delay
● Spot the unintentional tech debt and add it to the map

Spot the unintentional tech debt
● Ask the team!
○ Area with increasing cost of support / maintenance
○ Unplanned work rising
○ Diﬀicult estimation or forecast (low accuracy)
○ Bug / rework frequency
○ Static code analysis gives unexpected results

Donʼt forget the inevitable
Estimate the lifecycle and the cost of the worst-case scenario
Define an alarm as a “leading indicator”

How to deal with tech debt
Giving an order backlog/map/board of your tech debt
Pay it:
● Have a tech debt refactoring plan
○ Fixed time
○ Planned
○ Increasing urgency / Triage
● pay it on event (ex: at the first bug)
Monitoring the eﬀects of the payment

How to deal with the future tech debt
Check the estimation of your tech debt regularly and verify the actual costs
Monitoring your development process
(ex: adding people should reduce production in a typical way)
Set some alarms in your development process to have "leading indicators"
Make a safe-to-fail experiment to speed up production increasing the tech debt

Takeaways
Technical debt is practically inevitable in software/digital product development
Technical debt can become a threat when it is out of control
Technical debt is an opportunity for business agility
Having your technical debt under control allows you to speed up when it's needed

References
● Introduction to the Technical Debt Concept Agile Alliance, 2016
● The Agile Alliance Debt Analysis Model Agile Alliance, 2016
● The Developer Coeﬀicient - Software engineering eﬀiciency and its $3 trillion impact … Stripe, 2018
● Business costs of technical debt CodeScene, 2019
● How to Assess Infrastructure Technical Debt to Prioritize Legacy Modernization Investments Gartner, 2020
● Demystifying digital dark matter: A new standard to tame technical debt McKinsey Digital, 2022
● Measuring And Managing Technical Debt Forbes, 2022
● The Real Cost of Technical Debt J.P.Morgan, 2022
● Breaking technical debtʼs vicious cycle to modernize your business McKinsey Digital, 2023
● Technical debt: How to recognize, understand + manage tech debt Pluralsight blog, 2024

Questions

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