Prioritizing Technical Debt as if Time and Money Matters • Adam Tornhill • GOTO 2019

This presentation was recorded at GOTO Copenhagen 2019. #GOTOcon #GOTOcph
gotocph.com
Adam Tornhill - Author of "Your Code as a Crime Scene" ‪@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 us 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 [...]
Download slides and read the full abstract here:
gotocph.com/2019/sessions/974...
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
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#Legacy #DeveloperProductivity #Teams #TechnicalDebt
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[@c4tubo]

This is this most valuable video I've seen after watching many programming videos over the last month. Very well done.

[@Achrononmaster]

I'd say, "May the code sense be with you." Adam's work has gotten in to technical work in our government, it's improving government support for businesses who have social responsibilities, so I hope Adam knows how much he is improving whole segments of society beyond just software development. Thanks dude, funky Swedish accent and all.

[@asafali6491]

dear

[@vatreni8088]

Great talk! You analyzed your own code at the end. Identifying the power distribution and where to go is powerful and makes economic sense. The connections between services, components are true leverage.

[@Runesocesius]

Brilliant. Some really ground breaking stuff.

[@ottorask7676]

The main idea is stupidly simple now that I saw it, thanks! Does not remove the need to good old team work or communication, but is an immensely great conversation starter.

[@rolfkarlsson445]

This is food for thought. Great, Adam!

[@nyrtzi]

I can certainly testify that code that one isn't familiar with can feel way more complicated, scary and legacy than it is after you get acquainted with. Having good documentation of it lessens the impact thought as it makes it possible to get into it through having a way gentler learning curve.

[@trashmail8]

Thank you! This title sounds very promising! :)

[@clementcazaud8040]

Brillant, thanks for sharing your experience. The conclusion sums up the problem and solution pretty well... Desgin your application after business, not technology... Otherwise, you're likely trying to force your way against Conway's law. That's also a problem that Uncle Bob approaches with his Clean Architecture solution which is use cases centric (business features centric).

[@r3fuG4d0]

Thank you Adam, it was really enlightening!

[@ladefoged87]

This was one of my favorite talks from this years GOTO Copenhagen! We are trying to adapt the methods in a few of the teams I work with.. Good stuff!

[@ishanagrawal90]

How did it turn out for you so far?

[@KarenTazayan]

Thank you for the excellent talk!

[@nopara73]

I was thinking about unsubscribing from this channel due to the many hype topic content lately, but this video and the previous one convinced me to stay... for now. Great content!

[@Achrononmaster]

Conference technical debt. X-ray the frickin talks.

[@Kienlamb]

Lots of useful information in this talk, thanks!

[@7th_CAV_Trooper]

The problems Adam discusses are exactly what my client is working through right now. It's all very painful. I've shared this video. :p

[@flyinggeng]

Sounds like it was a bad microphone at start and it was corrected at 9 minutes.

[@hamdihadjer5691]

Thank you ;it is excellent

[@sandeepsachan3729]

Nailed it! #Adam Tornhill

[@2c7s]

What is that noise? I tried to play some music to make sure it's not my speakers.

[@nyrtzi]

So you fix the technical debt only where it's slowing down development and when it's worth it according to cost-benefit analysis? Locality of change based modularity kind of just sounds like modularity based on separation of concerns where the reason to change is in most cases a changing requirement. I'm not confident though that it's easy to weave an application together from modules encapsulating features if they tend to crosscut each other. I'm not sure which technique, language and tooling would allow for what I'm imagining mainly because if that's the way we cut it to pieces I'm not sure how I can easily get a bird's eye overview of how it all ties together. I'd love to hear any ideas on this.

[@aaronlong1298]

This some background noise that is aggrevating

[@TheForumgod]

Just chiming saying that it was the audio source itself on the presentation, it gets fixed around 8 minutes in.

[@kbrnsr]

7:48 audio improves

[@judgedbytime]

zipf distribution? 19:20

[@ilciavo]

Making an X-ray of the X-ray machine META

[@noonesenemy89]

The audio is really squeaky