SESSION + Live Q&A
A Crystal Ball To Prioritize Technical Debt
The technical debt metaphor has taken the software world with storm. No wonder, since software projects have their fair share of challenges. Most organizations find it hard to prioritize and repay their technical debt. The main reason is the scale of modern systems with million lines of code and multiple development teams; no one has a holistic overview. So what if we could mine the collective intelligence of all contributing programmers and start to make decisions based on data from how the organization actually works with the code?
Adam Tornhill introduces one such approach with the potential to change how we view software systems, offering an overview of techniques, based on software evolution and findings from various fields within psychology, that help uncover both problematic code and the social dimension of the teams that build your software. This combination lets you prioritize the parts of your system that benefit the most from improvements, detect organizational issues, and make practical decisions guided by data. Adam illustrates each point with a case study from a real-world codebase.
This new perspective on software development will change how you work with legacy systems.
Speaker
Adam Tornhill
Founder and CTO of Empear
Adam Tornhill is a programmer who combines degrees in engineering and psychology. He’s the founder and CTO of Empear, where he designs tools for software analysis. He’s also the author of Your Code as a Crime Scene, has written the popular Lisp for the Web tutorial, and self-published a book...
Read moreFind Adam Tornhill at:
Location
Mountbatten, 6th flr.
Track
Dark Code: The Legacy/Tech Debt Dilemma
Topics
Technical DebtShare
From the same track
Strategic Code Deletion
In most systems, code lives forever. Occasionally, we can delete it if we are sure it is not used; however, static path analysis and production monitoring of code usage are often expensive and present inconclusive results. In this talk, Michael Feathers will describe techniques that allow us to...
Michael Feathers
Author of Working Effectively with Legacy Code
Refactoring Mount Doom - Tackling Legacy Code
We’ve all had that nightmare where you are try to get to your destination, and keeping moving, trying different things, but for various reasons, you never arrive. Some refactorings are like that - you extract methods, name constants, increase readability… In short, you spend a lot of time...
Franziska Sauerwein
Software Craftswoman @Codurance
Using Quality Views to Tackle Tech Debt @Tesla
When you work in engineering or operations, you become intimately familiar with the challenges of technical debt. It can be difficult, however, to communicate the full cost to others in the organization, particularly to people who are non-technical. Communicating the risks for software systems...
Colin Breck
Sr. Staff Software Engineer @Tesla
Crushing Tech Debt Through Automation at Coinbase
In the past 4 years Coinbase has grown from one service in production to over 100. Our team has grown 50x, we’ve launched in 30 countries and reinvented ourselves several times as we mature and our industry evolves. We believe a failure mode of financial companies is the death of innovation...
Rob Witoff
Chief Architect @Coinbase