“Let me tell you about one colossal coding mess that I created. It was an
Italian restaurant filled with bowls of spaghetti code held together with
duct tape and Band-Aids.”
In my new book, Digital Trailblazer, I tell several of my stories of
creating and trying to address technical debt. The theme of the chapter is
that technical debt is now YOUR problem, and it has a simple meaning.
As you
move up into management and leadership roles, you now have the
responsibility of minimizing the creation of new tech debt, finding the most
impactful areas of tech debt to address, and prioritizing the work to reduce
tech debt.
Yes, as a tech, data, or product management leader, reducing tech debt is your problem and part of your responsibilities. Technical debt creates risks
to your business and slows down the DevOps, data, product management, and
other teams from releasing capability improvements.
Worse, it’s a point of stress for teams – and productivity loss when
agile teammates can only gripe about the tech debt issues but don’t have the
authority to prioritize addressing them.
So in this week’s Driving Digital Standup, I leave you three strategies for managing technical debt. Three of the strategies fall into a technical
plan, and three others I categorize as part of a business plan. You can
watch the video below – it’s my fiftieth on the channel and I hope you will
subscribe to it.
Ten posts on Technical Debt
I referenced ten of my previous posts on technical debt in the video. Here
they are:
