A Crystal Ball to Prioritize Technical Debt

The technical debt metaphor has taken the software world with storm. No wonder, since software projects have their fair share of challenges. Most organizations find it hard to prioritize and repay their technical debt. The main reason is due to the scale of modern systems with million lines of code and multiple development teams; No one has a holistic overview. So what if we could mine the collective intelligence of all contributing programmers and start to make decisions based on data from how the organization actually works with the code? This session introduces one such approach with the potential to change how we view software systems.

Transcript

1. @AdamTornhill
2. “Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development” Questioning Technical Debt https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TechnicalDebt.html @AdamTornhill
3. Interest Rate Is A Function Of Time http://i.imgur.com/a8Xo4Hp.png @AdamTornhill
4. All Technical Debt Isn’t Equal @AdamTornhill
5. @AdamTornhill Most Technical Debt Isn’t Technical
6. There’s A Strong Link Between Technical Debt And The Organisation @AdamTornhill
7. Wish List: Information to Prioritize Technical Debt @AdamTornhill Where’s the Highest Interest Rate? Does the Architecture Support the way our System Evolves? Any Productivity Bottlenecks for Inter-Team Coordination?
8. Collective Intelligence Social information Time @AdamTornhill Uncover Evolutionary Patterns In A System Frequencies
9. Hotspots Where’s The Highest Interest Rate?
10. Hotspots - A Tool To Prioritize @AdamTornhill
11. Code Complexity Code Change Frequency Hotspot @AdamTornhill
12. Hotspots - A Tool To Prioritize Hotspots Hotspots
13. All Code is Equal …but some Code is more equal than others* * Sorry, George Orwell
14. Why Hotspots Work 1 Year in Roslyn (C#, VB) 6 Years of Erlang 12 Years of Ruby on Rails Each file in the system Change Frequency Reference: Your Code as a Crime Scene, ISBN:1680500384 Prioritize improvements here! Ignore the long tail
15. Hotspots
16. Case Study: @AdamTornhill
17. gc.cpp @AdamTornhill
18. File Level Hotspots Function Level Hotspots X Ray Recommended functions to improve. Hotspots X-Ray
19. Read More: Function-Level @AdamTornhill
20. Normalization of Deviance @AdamTornhill
21. Supervise your Complexity Trends @AdamTornhill Warning Sign! Refactoring Increases again
22. Hotspots Summary Hotspots find the code with the highest interest rate. Hotspots work because all code isn’t equal. Supervise the Complexity Trend of your Hotspots.
23. Evaluate Your Architectural Patterns Does the Architecture Support the way our System Evolves?
24. Code is Auto-Destructive Art @AdamTornhill
25. Your System’s Tipping Point?
26. DRM Shared DRM/AMD … Specify Your Logical Components @AdamTornhill
27. Identify Hotspots on a (Micro)Service Level @AdamTornhill
28. FuelInjector Temporal Coupling Diagnostics Combustion Commit #1 Commit #2 Commit #3 Time @AdamTornhill Read More: http://www.empear.com/blog/software-revolution-part3/
29. Model Controller View Services ORM Repository SQL Layers: A Separation of Concerns General Observation: 30-70 % of all commits touch multiple layers @AdamTornhill Change Coupling
30. Supervise The Change Coupling Between Services @AdamTornhill Temporal Coupling (potentially across repository boundaries)
31. The Microservices Shotgun Surgery Pattern @AdamTornhill
32. Tools Evolution Radar http://reveal.inf.usi.ch/web/dambros/tools/evoradar.php CodeScene: free for open source (commercial) https://codescene.io/ Moose Platform: open source platform http://www.moosetechnology.org/ Code Maat: open source, text-only (GPL) https://github.com/adamtornhill/code-maat
33. Architecture Summary Identify your Architectural Hotspots. Know your System’s Tipping Point. Use Temporal Coupling to Evaluate your Architecture.
34. Meet The Social Side of Your Code Any Productivity Bottlenecks for inter-team coordination?
35. Process Loss Process Loss The Potential Productivity Individual Contributions Real Productivity Team Work @AdamTornhill
36. Diffusion of Responsibility
37. Fractal Value: M. D’Ambros, M. Lanza, and H Gall. Fractal Figures: Visualizing Development Effort for CVS Entities. Inter-Team Overlap Fractal Value 0 ~1.0 Views Integration Tasks Backup Tests Measure Team Coordination Excess Parallel Work The Diffusion of Responsibility
38. Measuring Conway’s Law Architectural Pattern: Package by Feature Views Features @AdamTornhill Front-End Team Export Team Recommendations Team Ads Team Calculations Team Backup Team
39. Team Team Team Team Team Team Team Team Team Team Team Team The Perils of Feature Teams @AdamTornhill
40. Align Your Architecture and your Organisation @AdamTornhill
41. Make Decisions Influenced By Data @AdamTornhill
42. @AdamTornhill Time - The Hidden Dimension of Software Design http://www.empear.com/blog/software-revolution-part3/ The Day I Parsed A Monster http://www.empear.com/blog/parse-a-monster/ Read The Book: Your Code As A Crime Scene https://pragprog.com/book/atcrime/your-code-as-a-crime-scene Explore The Analyses: https://codescene.io/ adam.tornhill@empear.com