Taming Your Dragon

Technical debt is an often-overlooked problem that the software industry needs to take more seriously. All organizations are impacted by it, most wish that they had less of it, but need help in understanding the nature of the beast. This book aims to clear up any misconceptions and show you how to implement a sound technical debt management program to suit your company’s needs.

You’ll learn the greatest challenge in solving the technical debt dilemma is not to find solutions to it, but rather to find solutions to the human and organizational issues that lead to that debt. For example, convincing senior stakeholders of the importance of addressing technical debt, getting stakeholders to acknowledge how their actions lead to unintentional debt, and enabling teams to prioritize technical debt over short-term goals.

Therefore, this book is divided into three parts: defining technical debt, understanding technical debt, and tackling technical debt. It begins by explaining why technical debt should not be considered a technical problem, but rather a problem of how trade-off decisions are made. You’ll then examine how making decisions using the affect heuristic, more commonly known as a “gut feeling,” can lead to unnecessary technical debt, followed by some techniques for combating your vulnerability to this trap.

Reducing your organization’s level of technical debt is not easy. Taming Your Dragon will show you how to implement a technical debt management program.

What You Will Learn

• Review a new paradigm based on technical debt being a combination of trade-off problems and system problems
• Understand the many ways that technical debt adversely affects an organization’s ability to deliver IT change
• Create an effective process for addressing technical debt
• See why analogies are important

Who This Book Is For

Software teams supporting DevOps, managers, and other business stakeholderslooking to implement a technical debt management program.

Table of Contents

Part I: Exploring Technical Debt

Chapter 1: What Is Technical Debt?

Chapter 2: Why You Need to Address Technical Debt

Chapter 3: Why Has Technical Debt Proved So Resistant to Solutions?

Part II: Understanding the Technical Debt Problem

Chapter 4: The Broken Analogy

Chapter 5: Technical Debt As a Trade-Off Problem

Chapter 6: Technical Debt As a Systems Problem

Chapter 7: Technical Debt As an Economics Problem

Chapter 8: Technical Debt As a Wicked Problem

Chapter 9: Common Technical Debt Anti-patterns

Chapter 10: Modeling Technical Debt with System Modeling Tools

Part Ill: Tackling Technical Debt

Chapter 11: Safely Convincing Everyone

Chapter 12: A Program to Address Technical Debt

Chapter 13: Preliminary Information Gathering

Chapter 14: Workshop for Problem Understanding

Chapter 15: Additional Information Gathering and Sensemaking

Chapter 16: Workshops for Solution Development

Chapter 17: Pilot Solutions

Chapter 18: Rollout and Stabilization

Chapter 19: Conclusion