• Technical debt: tends to focused on the code and reveals itself in duplication and code smells
• Quality debt: focuses on QA aspects of software development and shows up in growing bug databases and longer regression test runs
• Configuration Management debt: focuses on integration and release management aspects and becomes apparent with extreme branching and inability to recreate environments from scratch
• Design debt: focuses on design constructs of components within an application or enterprise infrastructure and is usually difficult to figure out until you are close to a deadline such handling production load
• Platform Experience debt: focuses on the people in the software creation process and usually involves extreme specialization and waiting on people to finish their part

Without further ado, here are the slides:

Also, here is the picture I use to discuss Managing Software Debt from high level in terms of maintaining and enhancing value of software assets:

My first blog entry back is about the upcoming Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference (PNSQC) that is happening from October 26-28 in Portland, OR. This conference was highly recommended to me by many people. This year I am fortunate enough to attend, have a paper published for the event, and presenting the paper for 45 minutes during the conference. Here are the details for my paper and presentation:

P-30 Managing Software Debt

Chris Sterling, SolutionsIQ

Many software developers will have to deal with legacy code at some point during their careers. Seemingly simple changes are turned into frustrating endeavors with code that is hard to read and unnecessarily complex. Test scripts and requirements are lacking, and at the same time are out of sync with the existing system. The build is cryptic, minimally sufficient, and difficult to successfully configure and execute. It is almost impossible to find the proper place to make a requested change without breaking unexpected portions of the application. The people who originally worked on the application are long gone.

How did the software get like this? It is almost certain the people who developed this application did not intend to create such a mess. This paper presentation will highlight ways teams can work with stakeholders to manage software debt over the delivery life cycle of the product.

I hope that I am able to see others at this event. If you are interested in attending and would like to get a $50 off the normal conference attendance fee, enter the promotion code “FOA – Chris Sterling” when registering. You can register at the PNSQC web site (http://www.pnsqc.org/2009-conference/registration-information). See you there!