Technical debt isn't technical

Technical debt is not primarily caused by incompetent developers, architecture astronauts, unrealistic UX people or even stupid project managers.

It is a symptom of insufficient understanding and modelling of the problem domain. These inadequacies are compounded by organisational inertia and communication problems. We cannot hope to address these problems by virtuous coding alone.

To avoid technical bankruptcy, we must step away from the keyboard and start addressing the complex mess of forces that shape the software we are making.

Participant takeaways

• Communication debt drives modelling debt drives technical debt
• Debt is framed as technical because the consequences manifest in code and because it is more comfortable for everyone if it is confined to code
• Reality doesn't care about the structures we try to impose upon it, and so constant reconceptualising and reformulation of the problem is expected and necessary
• Categories and concepts are much more fuzzy and dynamic than we tend to think.

This session will be:

Delivered: Hybrid (Live with some pre-recorded content)
Recorded: No

Themes: Domain Modelling , Systems Thinking , Socio-technical Systems , Organisational Psychology