Beyond Technical Debt

“Technical debt” is a successful metaphor that exposes software engineers to economics, and managers to a significant technical problem. It provides a language that both engineers (“technical”) and managers (“debt”) understand.

But, “technical debt” is just a metaphor that has its limitations, too. The most important limitation is that it presents a negative proposition: The best thing that can happen to you is having no technical debt.

Technical debt is both brought about and solved as a result of decisions. As such, we turn our attention to how people reach decisions about a software system. Decision making is a critical software engineering activity. Developers alone spend some half of their time reading code. This means half of the budget. Even though it is the single most significant development activity, nobody really talks about how this effort is being spent.

It’s time to change this. The talk motivates the need for software assessment as an explicit discipline, it introduces the humane assessment method and outlines the implications.

About Tudor Gîrba

Tudor Gîrba (tudorgirba.com) is a software environmentalist and co-founder of feenk.com where he works with an amazing team on the Glamorous Toolkit, a novel IDE that reshapes the Development eXperience (gtoolkit.com).

He built all sorts of projects like the Moose platform for software and data analysis (moosetechnology.org), and he authored a couple of methods like humane assessment (humane-assessment.com). In 2014, he also won the prestigious Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize for his research (aito.org). This was a surprising prize as he is the only recipient that was not a university professor, even if he does hold a PhD from the University of Bern from a previous life.

These days he likes to talk about moldable development. If you want to see how much he likes that, just ask him if moldable development can fundamentally change how we approach software development.

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