Archives for October 2008

Managing Software Debt – article

Managing Software Debt
Continued Delivery of High Values as Systems Age
Many software developers have to deal with legacy code at some point during their careers.  Seemingly simple changes are turned into frustrating endeavors.  Code that is hard to read and unnecessarily complex. Test scripts and requirements are lacking, and at the same time are out of [...]

Why Should We Manage Software Debt?

In the past I have blogged on software debt in terms of:

Going beyond code to manage software debt in “Clean Up, Clean Up, Everybody Do Your Share”
Problem with catching up on software debt in “The IT Manager’s Dilemma with Software Debt”

Although there are reasons defined or implied in those blog entries I think it is [...]

Refactoring: How Far Should I Go?

Refactoring is an essential practice for teams developing solid software and continually evolving the design to meet new customer needs. From the home page managed by Martin Fowler, who wrote the original book on refactoring, it says:
“Refactoring is a disciplined technique for restructuring an existing body of code, altering its internal structure without changing its [...]

The "Team Member in Siberia" Anti-Pattern

From time to time I speak with a team member, ScrumMaster, functional manager, or Product Owner that asks how do we handle maintenance tasks. After we get past the obvious question “why do you have a problem with maintenance tasks?” we discuss team configurations to handle their current maintenance pains.
Traditional methods of managing maintenance tasks [...]