Friday
Room 1 - Level 3
11:40 - 12:40
(UTC±00)
Talk (60 min)
Technical Neglect
Many developers evoke the mischievous spirit and day-to-day burden of technical debt to explain the misfortunes and troubles of their codebase and delivery. While unmanaged technical debt weighs down many codebases and exerts drag on their schedules, it is more often an effect than a cause.
In this talk, we will look at what is and is not meant by technical debt — and other metaphors — with a view to properly attributing the root and recurring cause as technical neglect rather than technical debt. Without seeing technical neglect for what it is, we will continue to misattribute our problems to an effect rather than a cause.
Kevlin Henney
Kevlin is an independent consultant, speaker, writer and trainer. His development interests, contributions and work with companies covers programming, people and practice. He has contributed to open- and closed-source codebases, been a columnist for a number of magazines and sites and has been on far too many committees (it has been said that "a committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled"). He is co-author of A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing and On Patterns and Pattern Languages, two volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series. He is also editor of 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know and 97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know. He lives in Bristol and online.