Tech Debt Burndown Podcast Series 1 E10: Eoin Woods

Show Notes

Recording date: May 25, 2021

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“There’s sometimes an assumption that people in the business of building systems all the time implicitly understand tech debt. I think they definitely don’t.” - Eoin Woods

After intros we ask Eoin about the International Conference on Technical Debt, which recently had its 4th annual event. Eoin was a keynote speaker at the first conference, and has stayed involved since.

Eoin goes on to explain that the academic community have found ways to collect data on tech debt that have evaded many practitioners, which has brought fresh insights onto the problems and how they might be addressed.

Nick asks about the Preventing Technical Debt by Technical Debt Aware Project Management paper from Hamburg and whether “can it be this easy?”; and Eoin replies that in the SEI book on Managing Technical Debt, “it’s one of the key practices”.

After a spot of collective JIRA bashing, Nick asks Eoin about the Security Debt: Characteristics, Product Life-Cycle Integrations and Items paper, describing it as “fully buzzword compliant, talking about shift left and everything like that”. Eoin observes that security related tech debt gets special treatment, “it’s rather more urgent to fix, because you may not understand all the possible implications of it”. He goes on to say that security has become more popular as a topic at conferences over the last 10 years or so.

Chris asks Eoin for one of his favourite examples of tech debt from the past, which leads to a description of an old Unix transaction processing monitor, and a giant C/C++ code base that grew around it. He talks about a colleague making good progress, but the sense that they weren’t actually winning.

Eoin then talks a little about lessons from his book Continuous Architecture in Practice, and goes on to describe how people often get stuck on a data model that’s not quite working.

Chris then asks Eoin about practices he’s currently using to handle tech debt, which leads to “It very much depends on the environment, I think the key thing that we try and encourage everyone to do is to make sure that you’re running enough analysis on your code regularly, that you can spot trends and changes.”

We conclude with a promise to link to Eoin’s book on Software Systems Architecture that he co-authored with Nick Rozanski, so there it is.

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