A Crystal Ball to Prioritize Technical Debt

GOTO Berlin 2017

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 due to 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? This session introduces one such approach with the potential to change how we view software systems.

In this session you'll get an introduction to techniques that help us uncover both problematic code as well as the social dimension of the teams that build your software. The techniques are based on software evolution and findings from various fields within psychology. 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. Each point is illustrated with a case study from a real-world codebase. This is a new perspective on software development that will change how you work with code.

Prerequisite attendee experience level: advanced