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

This presentation was recorded at GOTOpia Europe 2020. #GOTOcon #GOTOpia http://gotopia.eu Adam Tornhill - This best-selling author and 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. What if we could mine the collective intelligence of all contributing programmers and start making 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 lets 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 [...] TIMECODES 00:00 Intro 00:36 Lehman's "laws" of software evolution 03:50 Technical debt 09:15 Case study: Prioritizing technical debt 19:28 Why hotspots work 23:41 The legacy code link 26:07 Case study: How quickly can you turn your current codebase into legacy code? 34:26 Resources Download slides and read the full abstract here: https://gotopia.eu/2020/sessions/1452/prioritizing-technical-debt-as-if-time-and-money-matters RECOMMENDED BOOKS Adam Tornhill • Software Design X-Rays • https://amzn.to/3DEeEnI Adam Tornhill • Your Code as a Crime Scene • https://amzn.to/3FI5E2V Adam Tornhill • Lisp for the Web • https://leanpub.com/lispweb Adam Tornhill • Patterns in C • https://leanpub.com/patternsinc https://twitter.com/GOTOcon https://www.linkedin.com/company/goto- https://www.facebook.com/GOTOConferences #Legacy #LegacyCode #DeveloperProductivity #CodeComplexity #Complexity #Teams #TechnicalDebt #AdamTornhill Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket at http://gotocon.com SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL - new videos posted almost daily. https://www.youtube.com/user/GotoConferences/?sub_confirmation=1