Archive for November 2010
A Special Technical Debt Offer from the Cutter Consortium
The good folks at Cutter are making the October Issue of the Cutter IT Journal (CITJ) available to anyone who is interested in getting deeper into the intricacies of technical debt. Here is the table of contents for this issue:
- Opening Statement by Israel Gat
- Modernizing the DeLorean System: Comparing Actual and Predicted Results of a Technical Debt Reduction Project by John Heintz
- The Economics of Technical Debt by Stephen Chin, Erik Huddleston, Walter Bodwell, and Israel Gat
- Technical Debt: Challenging the Metaphor by David Rooney
- Manage Project Portfolios More Effectively by Including Software Debt in the Decision Process by Brent Barton and Chris Sterling
- The Risks of Acceptance Test Debt by Ken Pugh
- Transformation Patterns for Curing the Human Causes of Technical Debt by Jonathon Michael Golden
- Infrastructure Debt: Revisiting the Foundation by Andrew Clay Shafer
Being the guest editor for this issue, I can attest better than anyone else how much I learned from the various authors, from Karen Pasley (the October issue editor) and Chris Generali (CITJ Editor-in-Chief).
Click here for details of this special offer including downloading instruction.
Agile Enterprise Forum 2011
Charles Handy, Chris Potts, Don Reinertsen, John Seddon and I are the featured speakers in the Agile Enterprise Forum 2011. The Forum will be held on March 10, 2011 in the Chandos House at the Royal Society of Medicine, London. Attendance is limited to 30 CIOs.
The theme for the forum is Agility for Complex Organizations. The overarching message is nicely captured in the following summary by James Yoxall:
There are two strands of interest for a CIO: strategy and delivery. The Agile/Lean message can be summarised as “merging” the two, so that delivery can start before strategy is complete, and delivery informs strategy through feedback loops. This leads to a faster/earlier delivery and a better end result.
My own workshop – Agile Governance: Tying Delivery to Value – builds on this message by describing a specific strategic initiative which is not achievable without the use of advanced delivery techniques. Here is the abstract for my workshop:
This workshop will explore mechanisms for unlocking the full potential of existing software through the combination of Agile/Lean methods with technical debt techniques. These mechanisms apply to complex organisations that rely on in-house development teams as well as to third party delivery partners. Israel’s approach emphasizes the need to continuously monitor and mitigate the decay of software that more often than not had been developed over many years. Most importantly, it shows how well-governed software can become the enabler for unleashing the synergistic power of cloud, mobile and social.
You can think of the workshop as linking past, present and future. The “sins” of the past require technical debt reduction initiatives today. These initiatives utilize the classical Agile/Lean techniques of continuous measurement and tight feedback loops. Without such initiative, the value of existing software cannot be unlocked in the future. In particular, competing in the hyper-segmented markets that cloud, mobile and social generate will be next to impossible for legacy software that has not been modernized.
Jim Highsmith on the Financial Implications of Technical Debt
Jim Highsmith launched his new blog/website last week. I have no doubt whatsoever it will be a thought leadership blog. Moreover, knowing Jim I would expect the blog will address and integrate concepts and ideas from numerous disciplines, not “just” from software methods.
Jim’s first publicly available post – The Financial Implications of Technical Debt – explores the impact of technical debt on capitalization. To quote Jim:
So the bottom line for technical debt. It’s expensive to fix, but much more expensive to ignore. Technical debt reduces future earnings, but even more critically, it destroys predictability which in turn impacts market capitalization in the near term, not in the future.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnwardell/80125882/
Figure 1: Loss of Predictability
Jim’s post nicely closes the {financial –> technical –> financial} loop. Ward Cunningham’s original debt metaphor borrowed the financial term to apply it to software development. Jim is now bridging from the technical arena back to the financial world.
If you are into any form of agility – technical, managerial or business – you owe it to yourself to follow Jim’s blog.
The Agile Executive 