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Prioritize Technical Debt as if Time and Money Matter
PRESENTED BY
Adam Tornhill
Founder of CodeScene & Author of "Your Code as a Crime Scene"
Prioritizing technical debt is a hard problem as modern systems might have millions of lines of code and multiple development teams — no one has a holistic overview. In addition, there's always a trade-off between improving existing code versus adding new features so we need to use our time wisely.
What if we could mine the collective intelligence of all contributing programmers and start making decisions based on information from how the organization actually works with the code?
In this workshop, you'll learn how easily obtained version-control data lets you uncover the behavior and patterns of the development organization. This language-neutral approach lets you prioritize the parts of your system that benefit the most from improvements so that you can balance short- and long-term goals guided by data.
In this session, you’ll learn:
To prioritize technical debt in large-scale systems
Balance the trade-off between improving existing code versus adding new features
Visualize long time trends in technical debt
Take a data-driven approach to technical debt.
During this workshop, you get access to CodeScene – a behavioral code analysis tool that automates the analyses – which we use for the practical exercises. We’ll do the exercises on real world codebases in Java, C#, JavaScript and more to discover real issues.
Participants are also encouraged to take this opportunity to analyze their own codebase to get actionable take-away information.
Adam Tornhill
Adam Tornhill is a programmer who combines degrees in engineering and psychology. He’s the founder of CodeScene where he designs tools for code analysis. Adam is also the author of multiple technical books, including the best selling Your Code as a Crime Scene and Software Design X-Rays. Adam’s other interests include modern history, music, retro computing, and martial arts.
More from Adam
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Code quality fails to gain traction at the business level, leading software companies to prioritize new features over maintaining a healthy codebase. This trade-off results in technical debt that consumes up to 40% of developers' time, causing stress, frustration, and costly delays in product delivery. Despite its importance, it's hard to build a business case for code quality: how do we quantify and communicate the benefits to non-technical stakeholders? Or even inside our own engineering team?
Two and a half days with the people writing the playbook.
Insightful sessions, inspiring ideas, and meeting your peers — the skills and methods that take your organization to the next level.