This presentation was recorded at GOTO Amsterdam 2022. #GOTOcon #gotoams

http://gotoams.nl

Adam Tornhill - Founder & CTO at CodeScene & Author of Several Books Including "Your Code as a Crime Scene"

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.

What if we could mine the collective intelligence of all contributing programmers and start making 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 lets you 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 and more.

This new perspective on software development will change how you view code.

In this talk, you'll learn:

• To prioritize technical debt in large-scale systems

• To balance the trade-off between improving existing code versus adding new features

• To measure long time trends in technical debt [...]

TIMECODES

00:00 Intro

00:33 Lehman's "laws" of software evolution

03:17 Technical debt

07:39 Case study: Prioritizing technical debt

10:25 Can we measure "code complexity"?

19:27 Technical debt & people

22:33 Case study: How quickly can you turn your current codebase into legacy code?

27:48 Resources

Download slides and read the full abstract here:

https://gotoams.nl/2022/sessions/1609/prioritizing-technical-debt-as-if-time-and-money-matters

RECOMMENDED BOOKS

Adam Tornhill • Software Design X-Rays • https://amzn.to/3DEeEnI

Adam Tornhill • Your Code as a Crime Scene • https://amzn.to/3FI5E2V

Adam Tornhill • Lisp for the Web • https://leanpub.com/lispweb

Adam Tornhill • Patterns in C • https://leanpub.com/patternsinc

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