Making Agile Work Why Spend the Afternoon as well on Technical Debt?
No, I am not trying to “hijack” the Summit agenda messing with the afternoon sessions by colleagues Claude Baudoin and Mitchell Ummel. I am simply pointing out a corollary to the morning seminar that might be on your mind in the afternoon. Needless to say, thinking about it in the afternoon of the 28th instead of the afternoon of the 27th is quite appropriate…
Yesterday’s post concluded with a “what it all means” statement, as follows:
Technical debt is a meaningful metric at any level of your organization and for any department in it. Moreover, it is applicable to any business process that is not yet taking software quality into account.
If you accept this premise, you can use the technical debt metric to construct boundary objects
between various departments in your company/organization. The metric
could serve as the heart of boundary objects between dev and IT ops,
between dev and customer support, between dev and a company to which
some development tasks are outsourced, etc. The point is the enablement
of working agreements between multiple stakeholders through the
technical debt metric. For example, dev and IT ops might mutually agree
that the technical debt in the code to be deployed to the production
environment will be less than $3 per line of code. Or, dev and customer
support might agree that enhanced refactoring will commence if the code decays over time to more than $4 per line of code.
You can align various departments by by using the technical debt metric. This alignment is particularly important when the operational balance between departments has been disrupted. For example, your developers might be coding faster than your ITIL change managers can process the change requests.
A lot more on the use of the technical debt metric to mitigate cross-organizational dysfunctions, including some Outmodel aspects, will be covered in our seminar in Cambridge, MA on the morning of the 27th. We look forward to discussing this intriguing subject with you there!
Israel
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