The Economics of Technical Debt

Posted September 30, 2010 | Leadership |

Every development manager has faced the choices: Ship sooner? Squeeze in an extra feature? Test a little less to cut cost? Invest in infrastructure? Rewrite that problematic code? Virtually every development cycle goes through a similar set of tradeoffs multiple times in the course of getting code out the door. Every time a decision is made, the overall quality, maintainability, complexity, and stability of a software system goes up or down.

About The Author
Stephen Chin
Stephen Chin is the Lean/Agile Process Transformation Expert for GXS, where he is leading a large-scale agile rollout with hundreds of developers spread out across the globe. He also authored the leading reference on the JavaFX platform and is an internationally recognized speaker on rich client technologies and agile portfolio planning. Most recently, Mr. Chin developed an innovative, open source product portfolio Kanban tool that has become… Read More
Erik Huddleston
Erik Huddleston is CTO at Dachis Group, where he leads technology strategy and development. Prior to joining Dachis Group, Mr. Huddleston was CTO of Inovis, a SaaS integration company, where he ran product management and development and helped lead a large-scale agile rollout. He has been a practitioner of agile and lean techniques since 1998. Mr. Huddleston can be reached at erik at erik.net.
Walter Bodwell
Walter Bodwell is a Cutter Expert and a member of Arthur D. Little's AMP open consulting network. He has deep experience in Agile management, including rolling agility out in both small and large organizations. In 2008, Mr. Bodwell founded Planigle to help organizations in their quest for agility. Recently, he has been assisting a startup in getting it off the ground and establishing its development practices and working with a government agency… Read More
Israel Gat
Dr. Israel Gat is an expert in Agile and Lean methods, devops, software governance, technical debt and technical due diligence. He served as Cutter Fellow and the Director of the Agile Product Management & Software Engineering Excellence practice from 2008 until 2015, and now splits his time between consulting and writing. Dr. Gat has received many accolades from clients, such as “His approach is the only one I’ve found that actually works… Read More
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