Prioritizing Technical Debt as if Time and Money Matters • Adam Tornhill • GOTO 2020

Adam Tornhill explains how to use version-control data to identify and prioritize technical debt based on how teams actually interact with code.

This presentation was recorded at GOTO Chicago 2020. #GOTOcon #GOTOchgo gotochgo.com Adam Tornhill - This Best-selling Author & TEDx Speaker Will Forever Change the Way You Look at Code @adamtornhill2546 ABSTRACT Many codebases contain code that is overly complicated, hard to understand and hence expensive to change and evolve. Prioritizing technical debt is a hard problem as modern systems might have millions of lines of code and multiple development teams — no-one has a holistic overview. In addition, there's always a trade-off between improving existing code versus adding new features so we need to use our time wisely. So what if we could mine the collective intelligence of all contributing programmers and start to make decisions based on information from how the organization actually works with the code? In this presentation you'll see how easily obtained version-control data let you uncover the behavior and patterns of the development organization. This language-neutral approach lets you prioritize the parts of your system that benefit the most from improvements, so that you can balance short- and long-term goals guided by data. The specific examples are from real-world codebases like Android, the Linux Kernel, .Net Core Runtime and [...] TIMECODES 00:00 Intro 00:36 Lehman's "laws" of software evolution 02:04 Technical debt 06:35 Case study: Prioritizing technical debt 14:28 Why hotspots work 18:35 Resources Download slides and read the full abstract here: gotochgo.com/2020/sessions/1263/prioritizing-technical-debt-… RECOMMENDED BOOKS Adam Tornhill • Software Design X-Rays • amzn.to/3DEeEnI Adam Tornhill • Your Code as a Crime Scene • amzn.to/3FI5E2V Adam Tornhill • Lisp for the Web • leanpub.com/lispweb Adam Tornhill • Patterns in C • leanpub.com/patternsinc twitter.com/GOTOcon linkedin.com/company/goto- facebook.com/GOTOConferences #Legacy #DeveloperProductivity #Teams #TechnicalDebt Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket at gotocon.com SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL - new videos posted almost daily. youtube.com/user/GotoConferences/?sub_confirmation=1