Workshop: Tackling Technical Debt: An Analytical Approach
summary
Defines technical debt as maintenance load caused by context loss and gives a concrete metric (percent of developer time) plus examples where that number surprises (servers crashed three times, 92% in one time zone, an app used by 11 million). Lays out five actionable stewardship skills and five prioritized, data‑driven fixes (remove feature bloat, forensic software analysis, targeted refactors) with hands‑on exercises and real bug fixes (UI delete control, auth and timezone workarounds).
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chapters (28)
- 0:00Start
- 2:57What Is Technical Debt
- 4:47Maintenance Load
- 6:22Context Loss
- 7:19Context Lost
- 8:35How Do You Know if Your Maintenance Load Is under Control
- 10:28What Is Your Worst Maintenance Load Horror Story
- 13:19What Practices Distinguish Your Maintenance Load Horror Stories from Good Stories
- 16:17Writing Code with the Malleability and Rigidity in the Right Places
- 20:41Transferring Context to Other Members of the Team
- 22:02Individual Exercise
- 25:14Avoiding Premature Abstraction
- 32:24Technical Debt First Steps
- 32:49To Identify Culprits in the Code
- 33:15Step One Identify Culprits in the Code
- 34:32What Is a Code Renovation
- 36:27What Happens to Maintenance Load When Context Is Lost
- 43:57Prioritizing the High Leverage Changes
- 49:10Address Abandoned Houses at the Point Where a Change Is Needed
- 49:52Forensic Software Analysis
- 50:49Context Transfer
- 51:22Emergency Priorities
- 53:51Equipping Engineers To Suggest Streamlining Options
- 1:02:24Ticket Priority Poll
- 1:17:34Third Priority
- 1:25:11Roadmap for the Next Year
- 1:28:41Developer Morale
- 1:29:38Functional Navigation
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