Assessing Your Technical Debt

Leader: Israel Gat, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium

Do you really govern the software development process in your IT organization or do its uncertainty and unpredictability leave you, your internal customers and your company's customers aghast? Will technical debt play havoc with deployment dates you committed to and keep your development and operations staff from responding quickly and effectively to customer requests? Do you know how much money is required to "pay back" your software's technical debt? Once you take the Cutter Consortium Technical Debt Assessment seminar you will know how to quantify technical debt, rein it in and mitigate its unpleasant consequences.

The primary goals of this workshop are to give you a solid understanding of the nature of technical debt and how it impacts value delivery, and to familiarize you with state of the art tools for measuring technical debt. We'll also introduce you to a corresponding governance framework that ensures your can scientifically manage your software development process. Between the tools and the framework you will be able to meaningfully "x-ray" the software you are developing at the desired granularity at any point time. Moreover, you will be able to reduce a large number of complex technical considerations to a common denominator that is easily understood by your peers and superiors - the $$ amount required to pay back the accrued technical debt. By the end of the workshop you will know how to:

• Quantify the amount of technical debt you "owe"
• Assess the severity of your technical debt situation based on breakdown of the technical debt
• Combine development productivity data with quality metrics to determine which projects are worth fixing and which might need to be started afresh
• Drive the "fix-it" process through quantified hard data with special emphasis on readiness (or lack thereof) for deployment and identify error-prone modules, and assessment of future customer support load
• Mitigate development risks through the use of technical debt as an early warning sign
• Pay back technical debt in a highest-bang-for-the-buck manner
• Launch Dev/Ops projects on solid foundations

This workshop combines presentation with group exercises. Throughout the session, you and your team will be asked to refer to technical debt situations you have encountered and any additional techniques you have seen work.