Technical Debt – Workshop, paper, game, presentation

November 20, 2010

News: 2nd Technical debt workshop in May in Honolulu…

Every software guru out there has now a blog entry on Technical Debt, so why not me? I will not repeat the basics, which are repeated everywhere and, which you can get from the masters, in particular:

Steve McConnell, Notes on Technical Debt (2007), Blog post
Martin Fowler, Technical debt quadrant (2009), Blog post
Useful material on this topic from folks at the Cutter Consortium (I. Gat, J. Highsmith et al.) is unfortunately more hidden. (Actually, they offer the whole special issue for free, for a short while: http://www.cutter.com/offers/technicaldebt.html.)

Technical debt is more a rhetorical concept than a technical, scientific or ontological concept, but it seems to resonate well with the software development community, sometimes with managers and business people.

From a scientific viewpoint, we know little about technical debt. I take part in a little research project sponsored by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), with colleagues Ipek Ozkaya, Rod Nord and Nanette Brown to investigate technical debt.

As part of that effort we have organized a workshop on technical debt on June 2-3, 2010 in Pittsburgh,
The results of this workshop are consigned in the paper “Managing Technical Debt in Software-Reliant Systems”, presented at the Future of Software Engineering Research (FoSER) workshop in November 7-8, 2010 (preprint).
We also created a little board game to illustrate the concept of technical debt. It is called Hard Choices, and is available to download and play (and improve) under a Creative Commons license. I’ve played it with various audience, architects, business analysits and university students in many places around the world.
We will organize a workshop on technical debt in May 2011, at ICSE, in Hawaii and we invite practitioners and researchers to come and share their findings, opinions, methods, on technical debt. Se the call for contributions here.
I made this month several presentations on technical debt while in the Netherlands. See my Talks page, or this link for a copy of the slides.