Скачать или смотреть How Tech Debt Kills Your Startup’s Velocity (and What to Do)

💸 Think of #techdebt as your mortgage: Skip payments and the bank takes your house.

Wouldn't that make it easier for technical leaders to communicate to non-technical leaders that you have to pay your mortgage every month?

It's simple.

If you don't actively pay your #technicaldebt, bad actors could exploit known #security holes.

If you don't actively pay even the interests, your engineering team would take 5x the time it would usually take to deliver simple features and patches.

We can debate definitions all day, but the reality is the same: you must take steady, intentional action to pay it down.

When I spoke with Drew Mabry recently, we agreed: as technical leaders, our real job is getting buy-in from non-technical decision makers.

👉 What’s your go-to strategy for pitching tech debt remediation (like a much-needed #rails upgrade) to business leaders? Share in the comments below 👇

Transcript

Drew Mabry: You have a reputation around Rails upgrades. Like how do you convince non-technical founders that this unsexy work is actually important?

Ernesto Tagwerker: Yeah, that's a hard one to pitch non-technical founders or decision makers because they believe that technical debt is okay, you know, because they think technical debt is just like a mortgage that you get to buy a house. But the problem with technical debt is it will get you there faster initially, but then it starts to like accumulate like interests that are like exponentially increasing over time. So if you had taken that upgrade seriously, then it would have taken a few hours of your engineering team to do. But you postponed it for 10 years or 15 years, and then that turns into like a multi-month project that is gonna cost a ton more than if you had prioritized that in the beginning. So I want non-technical leaders to listen to their engineering leaders, you know, and to say, okay, when they're talking about technical debt and paying down technical debt that they listen and do what the engineering leaders are asking, because it's going to make things easier in the long run. Like the velocity, which the engineering team will churn out features is going to be higher if the technical debt is lower. And that particular problem is very hard to explain to like non-technical folks.

#infosec #devsecops #dx #codequality #rubyonrails #softwareengineering #softwaremaintenance