Technical Debt in Practice

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.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
12 Conclusions
Appendix--Full Text of Interviews
Interview: Marco Bartollini
Interview: Julien Danjou
Interview: Nicolas Devillard
Interview: Vadim Mikhnevych
Interview: Andriy Shapochka
Index"If there is one thing that businesses should really care about beyond tech buzzwords, it is technical debt. This book provides a clear framework to a complex subject and practical recipes for managing it for everyone from technologists to business leaders.”
—Serge Haziyev, SVP, Advanced Technologies, SoftServe Inc.
 
“With an emphasis on technical debt throughout the software product lifecycle, this book is filled with insights, advice, and pearls of wisdom. The authors possess a rare blend of engineering and scientific knowledge and deep experience from working on a wide spectrum of application domains, which is distilled into a concise and approachable form.” 
—Ian Gorton, ‎Professor of the Practice and Director of Computer Science, Northeastern University–Seattle
 
 “The release of this book is timely, but more importantly, the book offers a fresh view of real-world use cases and a pragmatic approach to managing technical debt. All too often the discussions end with abstract concepts; however, Ernst, Kazman, and Delange help convey the concepts using a structured approach that takes you from identifying to managing and then avoiding debt in each of the software development life cycle stages. This book offers something for everyone. It is an essential resource for academics and students studying technical debt, but more importantly to practitioners who can benefit from the validated metrics, methods, and tools discussed throughout. The use cases offer a necessary perspective that brings it all together.”
—Clemente (Clem) Izurieta, Associate Professor of Computer Science, Montana State UniversityNeil Ernst is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. Julien Delange is Staff Software Engineer at Twitter and Founder of Code Inspector, a technical debt platform analysis. Rick Kazman is Professor in the Department of Information Technology Management at the University of Hawaii and Visiting Researcher at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.