Technical Debt & Software Quality Assurance
The term Technical Debt was first coined by Ward Cunningham in 1992, and refers to strategic choices that are made to ship code out the door faster despite the negative impact it has on the maintainability of the code.
“In this metaphor, doing things the quick and dirty way sets us up with a technical debt, which is similar to a financial debt. 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 because of the quick and dirty design choice.” – Martin Fowler.
Technical Debt can be calculated as the cost of fixing the structural quality problems in an application that put the business at risk if left unfixed. On-going software quality testing will help manage and monitor Technical Debt correctly.
- Learn to Pay Down the Interest of IT Technical Debt, and Benchmark it against the Industry
- The CRASH Report on Software Quality and Technical Debt trends by CAST
- Design debt economics: A vocabulary for describing the causes, costs, and cures for software maintainability problems
- Third International Workshop on Managing Technical Debt
Recent blogs
Exploring the Concept of Technical Debt
By Alexandra Szynkarski | April 26, 2012
One of the interesting things about the “Technical Debt” concept is seeing how it evolves and moves forward in the software engineering world. Of course this means that the software debt concept can sometimes seem blurred as people adapt it to ... read more
A Technical Debt Simulator
By Alexandra Szynkarski | April 24, 2012
How do you explain Software Debt to a non-software developer? Jason Roberts has put together a Technical Debt Simulator: some simple visualizations of the cost of software debt over time depending on the type of coding practices the developers are impl... read more
3 Concepts to Aid Developers in Addressing Technical Debt
By Alexandra Szynkarski | April 6, 2012
There are a couple of blog posts out there that talk about the developer’s perspective on technical debt. I find this topic especially interesting as the developers are the ones who work on the fundamentals of a company’s software applications. But... read more
Recent articles
Technical Debt in Business Applications - World Quality Report
By Alexandra Szynkarski | March 2, 2012
Capgemini and HP recently released their “World Quality Report" (WQR) which examines the state of application technical quality and testing practices across different industries and geographies. This year, they partnered with CAST Research ... read more
Pragmatic Agile Development: How to develop fast & contain Technical Debt
By Rod Newing | January 6, 2012
Mr Brown and Mr Black lived next door to each other. They both needed to build new houses for themselves to give more space for their families and a better living environment.
Mr Brown hired a group of waterfall builders. After a year he asked how t... read more
10 Thoughts on Technical Debt
By Alexandra Szynkarski | January 2, 2012
“Technical Debt”, much like Design Debt or Testing Debt, is one of those metaphors that does not need an explanation in itself - you do not need to explain in 100 words in order for the person in front of you to understand what is going. It become... read more
