Last updated on May 19th, 2021 at 07:55 pm
Welcome to Technical Debt for Policymakers. I’m Rick Brenner, and what you’ll find here are resources, insights, and conversations of interest to policymakers who are concerned with managing technical debt within their organizations.
Terminology in the technical debt community is far from standard. So a good place to begin reading this blog is the terminology category, where I explain my own use of relevant terms in this blog. If you’re a new visitor, you might want to follow this outline:
Introduction to technical debt for policymakers
- Technical Debt: So What?
- Who are the policymakers?
- Technical debt in software engineering
- Examples of assets that are carrying technical debt:
- What is policy?
- A policymaker’s definition of technical debt
The psychology of metaphors
The technical debt metaphor is both powerful and perilous. Its power lies in its ability to communicate the concept that some technological assets regarded as operational might — and probably do — need further attention. The peril arises when we think of this metaphorical technical debt as if it were a financial debt. These posts explore the properties of metaphors, and how they can mislead us.
- Metaphors and the term technical debt
- The structure of metaphors
- Unintended associations of the technical debt metaphor
Unintended association: principal
The common understanding of principal in the context of financial debts doesn’t apply to technical debt. Formulating sound technical debt policy depends on understanding the nature of the difference between the principal of a financial debt and the metaphorical principal associated with technical debt.
- The metaphorical principal of a technical debt
- Policy implications of the properties of MPrin
- How MPrin can change spontaneously
- Debt contagion: how technical debt can create more technical debt
- Useful projections of MPrin might not be attainable
- Examples of MPrin in four scenarios
- MPrin in a development project
- MPrin in a platform component upgrade
- MPrin when standards or regulations change
- MPrin for missing or incomplete capability
Unintended association: interest
The common understanding of interest charges on financial debts doesn’t apply to technical debt. Formulating sound technical debt policy depends on understanding the nature of the difference between interest on financial debt and the metaphorical interest charges associated with technical debt.
- How financial interest charges differ from interest charges on technical debt
- The concept of MICs
- MICs can fluctuate dramatically
- MICs on technical debt can be unpredictable
- MICs can differ for different instances of the same kind of technical debt
- MICs can sometimes be deferred or advanced without penalty
- MICs on technical debt can be difficult to measure
- MICs can change when other debts are retired
- Where the misunderstandings about MICs come from
- The Principal Principle: Focus on MICs
The role of enterprise culture
Assuming that the culture of an organization affects its ability to manage technical debt, a reasonable goal might be to define a set of attributes an organizational culture should have if the people of the organization want to limit the role of culture in the formation and persistence of technical debt. This group of posts explores how culture and technical debt interact.
- Organizational culture and technical debt
- On assigning responsibility for creating technical debt
- With all deliberate urgency
- Technical debt: monochronic and polychronic cultures
- Cultural debt can be the primary driver of technical debt
- Using SMART goals for technical debt reduction
- Technical debt smell
- Technical debt use disorder
- Leverage points for technical debt management
Tension between policymakers and technologists
Tension between policymakers and technologists, which can lead to misalignment of their respective priorities, can contribute to uncontrolled growth of technical debt. This thread explores this tension and introduces concepts helpful to policymakers and technologists as they try to control the growth of technical debt.
- Tension between policymakers and technologists
- Adopt an enterprise-wide definition of technical debt
- Spontaneous generation
- Exogenous technical debt
Nontechnical precursors of nonstrategic technical debt
Nonstrategic technical debt results from misconceptions, accidents, pressure, cognitive biases…almost any source other than engineering purpose. These posts explore some of its precursors, including:
- Nontechnical precursors of nonstrategic technical debt
- Failure to communicate the technical debt concept
- Failure to communicate long-term business strategy
- Technological communication risk
- Team composition volatility
- The Dunning-Kruger effect can lead to technical debt
- Unrealistic definition of done
- Self-sustaining technical knowledge deficits during contract negotiations
- Performance management systems and technical debt
- Zero tolerance and work-to-rule create adversarial cultures
- Stovepiping can lead to technical debt
- Separating responsibility for maintenance and acquisition
- The fundamental attribution error
- Feature bias: unbalanced concern for capability vs. sustainability
- Unrealistic optimism: the planning fallacy and the n-person prisoner’s dilemma
- Confirmation bias and technical debt
- How outsourcing leads to increasing technical debt
- How budget depletion leads to technical debt
- Contract restrictions can lead to technical debt
- Organizational psychopathy: career advancement by surfing the debt tsunami
- The Tragedy of the Commons is a distraction
- The Broken Windows theory of technical debt is broken
- Malfeasance can lead to new technical debt
Solutions
When you embark on efforts to reduce the burden of technical debt,
as you might expect, traps and pitfalls await. Posts in this section explore some of those traps,
and suggest approaches that might lead to desired results with a little less risk.
as you might expect, traps and pitfalls await. Posts in this section explore some of those traps,
and suggest approaches that might lead to desired results with a little less risk.
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- Managing technical debt
- Leverage points for technical debt management
- Undercounting nonexistent debt items
- Crowdsourcing debt identification
- Demodularization can help control technical debt
- Legacy debt incurred intentionally
- Metrics for technical debt management: the basics
- Accounting for technical debt
- Three cognitive biases
- The resilience error and technical debt
- Synergy between the reification error and confirmation bias
- Retiring technical debt can be a wicked problem
- Retiring technical debt can be a super wicked problem
- Degrees of wickedness
- Nine indicators of wickedness
- Retiring technical debt from irreplaceable assets
- Where is the technical debt?
- Auxiliary technical debt: Rules of engagement
- Legacy technical debt retirement decisions
- Retiring localizable technical debt
- Controlling incremental technical debt
- Automation-assisted technical debt retirement
- Outsourcing Technical Debt Retirement Projects
- Refactoring for policymakers
- The trap of elegantly stated goals
Or go directly to the blog posts.
Enjoy!