Technical Debt in Practice : How to Find It and Fix It

✍ Scribed by Neil Ernst, Rick Kazman, Julien Delange

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Year: 2021
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 288
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The practical implications of technical debt for the entire software lifecycle; with examples and case studies.

Technical debt in software is incurred when developers take shortcuts and make ill-advised technical decisions in the initial phases of a project, only to be confronted with the need for costly and labor-intensive workarounds later. This book offers advice on how to avoid technical debt, how to locate its sources, and how to remove it. It focuses on the practical implications of technical debt for the entire software life cycle, with examples and case studies from companies that range from Boeing to Twitter.

Technical debt is normal; it is part of most iterative development processes. But if debt is ignored, over time it may become unmanageably complex, requiring developers to spend all of their effort fixing bugs, with no time to add new features--and after all, new features are what customers really value. The authors explain how to monitor technical debt, how to measure it, and how and when to pay it down. Broadening the conventional definition of technical debt, they cover requirements debt, implementation debt, testing debt, architecture debt, documentation debt, deployment debt, and social debt. They intersperse technical discussions with "Voice of the Practitioner" sidebars that detail real-world experiences with a variety of technical debt issues.

✦ Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
  1    Introduction
  2    The Importance of Technical Debt
  3    Requirements Debt
  4    Design and Architecture Debt
Case Study A: Brightsquid
  5    Implementation Debt
  6    Testing Debt
Case Study B: Twitter
  7    Deployment Debt
  8    Documentation Debt
Case Study C: Scientific Software
9    Technical Debt in Machine Learning Systems
10    Team Management and Social Debt
11    Making the Business Case
Case Study D: Safety-Critical System
12    Conclusions
Appendix—Full Text of Interviews
Interview: Marco Bartolini
Interview: Julien Danjou
Interview: Nicolas Devillard
Interview: Vadim Mikhnevych
Interview: Andriy Shapochka
Index