A couple days ago I spoke at the Beyond Agile group meeting on the topic of “Recognizing Software Debt”. Early in the presentation we ran an exercise to get a feel for the effects of software debt that was original created by my friend, Masa Maeda. Here is a link to the exercise: http://www.agilistapm.com/understand-technical-debt-by-playing-a-game/ The [...]
Archives for Software Architecture
Delving into Technical Debt – Cutter Article
The following is an except from the article authored by Israel Gat and myself named “Delving into Technical Debt”: Many of the findings and the recommendations we make in Cutter technical debt engagements are broadly applicable in concept, if not in detail. There is commonality in the nature of the hot spots we typically find, [...]
Interview with Spot On Business: Agility for the Long Haul
On November 1st at 2:00pm ET (11:00am PT) for about 45- to 60-minutes, Gil Broza will have me on as an interview guest on his series “Spot On Business” talking about “Agility for the Long Haul”. You may sign up at http://3pvantage.com/csterling/saveMySeat.php?ver=SC to be part of the conversation. Here is a brief description of the [...]
Treating Software as an Asset
William Caputo wrote a passionate blog entry on why “Software is not an asset” here: http://www.williamcaputo.com/archives/000310.html Although I entirely agree with ideas discussed about refactoring and removal of code, I do not think that the blog entry substantiates his claim that software is not an asset. An asset is: Anything tangible or intangible that is [...]
InformIT Interview with Chris Sterling
Matt Heusser, on behalf of InformIT, conducted an interview with me regarding the book Managing Software Debt: Building for Inevitable Change. We discuss what software debt is, some ways that it can be managed, maintaining a single list of work, how software debt is measured, and we even got into training and our product AgileEVM.com. [...]
Automated Promotion through Server Environments
To get towards continuous deployment, or even continuous validated builds, a team must take care of their automated build, test, analyze, deploy scripts. I always recommend that you have 2 scripts: deploy rollback And that these scripts are used many times per iteration to reduce the risk of surprises when deploying to downstream server environments, [...]




