Paying Down Technical Debt

Your reputation as a development team depends on your ability to deliver quality code-on time, safely, and with the functionality you committed to deliver. Whenever you compromise good design principles or development habits, you make future modifications and maintenance of the system more difficult and costly. We all know that eventually we will need to return to fix our short cuts and mistakes-this is technical debt. Like financial debt, technical debt grows and compounds if we do not deal with it immediately. Amir Kolsky discusses the technical debt that can pervade the organization-from the product definition, thorough development and testing, and into deployment. He describes how the debt manifests itself and how to identify technical debt-not only in the code but also in the way we work. Join Amir and your peers to explore methods to reduce your existing debt and actions you can take to prevent future debt.