Technical debt hurts: How to recognize and eliminate it

Carola Lilienthal (Workplace Solutions)

9:00–10:30 Wednesday, 6 November 2019

Location: M4/M5

Fundamentals

Secondary topics: Best Practice

Average rating:

(5.00, 10 ratings)

Who is this presentation for?

Software architects, software developers, and project managers

Level

Intermediate

Description

Almost every software system is developed with good intentions but under difficult conditions. Deadlines, different qualifications, and misunderstandings in the development team lead to the architecture of the system eroding and technical debt is built up step by step, until the whole system is woven into a messy big knob and every adjustment becomes an incalculable cost screw. Neither the development team nor the management enjoy a system in such a state.

Carola Lilienthal explains how you can organize and further develop your source code to prevent the emergence and increase of technical debt. You’ll see which principles help to avoid technical debt and how they can be eliminated through appropriate refactoring. All of the recommendations are based on examples from the more than 300 analyses Carola has carried out on a wide variety of software systems. She also presents helpful tools.

Prerequisite knowledge

Experience programming and with large software systems (useful but not required)

What you'll learn

Understand what causes technical debt in software architecture, how to classify technical debt and how to recognize it, what to do to prevent technical debt, and how to get rid of technical debt if it's already there

Carola Lilienthal

Workplace Solutions

Carola Lilienthal is senior software architect and managing director at Workplace Solutions and loves to design well-structured, long-living software systems. She and her teams have been using domain-driven design (DDD) since 2003 to achieve this goal. DDD and long-livingness of software architectures are the topic of many talks she has given at various conferences. She condensed her experience in the book Sustainable Software Architecture, and has translated the book Domain-Driven Design Distilled by Vaughn Vernon into German.