InfoQ Homepage Technical Debt Content on InfoQ
-
Is Unhedged Call Options a Better Metaphor for Bad Code?
In a blog post on bad code and technical debt Steve Freeman described how Chris Matts came up with the metaphor of an unhedged call option for bad code. This post is being intensively discussed on Reddit and on Hacker News recently. InfoQ interviewed Steve and Chris about using metaphors for bad code and code smells, trade-offs and costs of low quality code, and responsibilities for code quality.
-
Designing Systems for Testability
Testability must be explicitly designed in the system said Peter Zimmerer from Siemens AG. Test architects should drive testability and collaborate with architects, designers and testers in using good design and engineering practices. At the QA&Test 2014 conference Peter gave a tutorial about design for testability for embedded software systems.
-
Advice on When to Repay Technical Debt
An exploration of recent advice from Henrik Knibert, Ward Cunningham and Hayim Makabee on technical debt, how to make the most of it and when to pay it off.
-
Rocket to Mars: A Sprint Planning Game
“Many team and their product owners believe that the team's unique job is to deliver more and more story points, but we consider this to be a complete misunderstanding of the relation between the team and the product owner” said Damien Thouvenin and Pierrick Revol. They ran a sprint planning game on investing time to produce stories, investigate issues, reduce technical debt, or do training.
-
Should You Create User Stories for Technical Debt?
Agile teams sometimes struggle with the planning of pure technical tasks that have no direct value for the user of a system, but have to be done to deliver working software. Should you create user stories to handle such technical tasks and technical debt, or not?
-
XP Days Benelux 2012, second day sessions
The 10th anniversary edition of the XP Days Benelux 2012 conference continues on the second day. An impression of the sessions about agile adoption, self organizing and managing technical debt.
-
Technical Debt Is Now Costing Us $3.61 Per Line Of Code
According to a report by CAST Software, technical debt now costs a company on average $3.61 per line of code. The report's findings are summarized in this article and more discussion is presented from other thought leaders on the topic.
-
Is Technical Debt Still a Useful Metaphor?
A discussion has been taking place on the LinkedIn Agile Alliance group questioning if "technical debt" is still a valid metaphor in today's global software development world. This discussion has surfaced a strong support for the effectiveness of the metaphor even after 20 years.
-
How To Pay Down Technical Debt
Technical debt can be difficult to connect directly to customer value, but delivering customer value is what Agile processes are all about. So how can we track and reduce technical debt in an Agile development environment?
-
Is Technical Debt a Technical Issue?
Is technical debt a purely technical issue that can be addressed directly by refactoring and tests or is it a symptom of a bigger problem? Will the adoption of TDD fix the issue or just cover up a symptom of something bigger?
-
Software Debt Adds Up to Substantive Costs
In a recent article entitled “Continued Delivery of High Values as Systems Age”, Chris Sterling discusses the concept of Software Debt – “Software debt accumulates when focus remains on immediate completion while neglecting changeability of the system over time.” Software Debt goes beyond technical debt an encompases a variety of aspects that impact on the ability to deliver value.
-
Interview: Software Design Helps Being Agile
In this interview made by InfoQ’s Deborah Hartmann during Agile 2008, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock talks about software design, the need for good design and the technical debt that might accumulate slowing down the development process. The conclusion is that agile developers should not disregard design.