[Music] hi everyone I'm John Lim and this is the Enterprise agility podcast we've got Fred Champlain and anny Jorden on today to tell us about the Perils of technical debt whether it's longer development Cycles or degraded user experience Enterprises must be conent of the negative impacts so Andy take us away this time um we're going to talk about the idea of technical debt now I'm not that smart so I had to go and look this up cuz I thought that was just a credit card bill after you bought a new computer but it turns out that technical debt is the problem that organizations face sometimes when they are looking to launch new applications New pieces of software as quickly as possible and that race to speed sometimes results in buil-in problems that can cost the organization money down the road as they try and fix it or when it turns out that the Solutions not fit for purpose and You' got to deal with all the challenges with that but Fred you are much more of an expert on this idea of technical debt than I am so Enlighten us Andy wonderful to be here with you um yeah let's talk about technical debt I think this is a a critical Factor uh for organizations as they um scale they transform uh to compete in their in their respective markets um technical debt is is a term that's can be used rather broadly um and essentially um you know it emanates from more from an Enterprise uh technology or architecture uh perspective um where we think of technical debt as as either decisions that were made or outcomes uh that later on present some kind of um usually technical constraint it may be a design uh decision that was made that later on presents uh a constraint that have to work with either to resolve it make a design change maybe make a technology change um one way to think about technical debt from a non-technical perspective is it's really represents um you know deferred investment um it's really uh essentially sometimes deferred maintenance uh depending on the situation in all cases though technical debt really represents potential blockers of flow of value to customers and we really want to be aware of where technical debt is in our landscape uh almost any large organization has acrw technical debt um and we always want to be working to reduce that uh but not across the board we want to understand and prioritize where those technical debt um reductions uh are are best those Investments are best placed um and and really at the end of the day we're thinking about delivery of value to customers as the objective and I think that's a key Point here right is that it's not about eliminating technical debt completely it's about understanding where your technical debt is and what the right strategy is for dealing with it whether it is to just accept it as one of those things whether it's to schedule the removal of it as part of you know an ongoing maintenance and upgrade process or whether it's a case of we need to invest in this area right now because the impact on value or the potential impact the risk to value is is too excessive to just live with any longer that's right Andy um many times uh teams will will plan whether it's a product team or a internal it team or an application team they'll do their planning and as best as you can do planning uh there's surprises sometimes and many times though those surprises come from a technical or of technical nature from architecture uh there's some constraint that we weren't aware of and that happens surprisingly very frequently and it causes disruption um and replanning which means lost time uh loss competitiveness uh and we really want to be able to see that as much as we can had of course and and understand that so that's what's really driving uh the concern and the interest of technical Deb another side of technical debt is you can [Music] overinvestment over invest uh by by literally by by the monetary investment but also you can over invest maybe in in reducing the wrong technical debt it's hard sometimes to anticipate what technical debt will be a factor uh a year or two out but this is part of what we're trying to consider when we think about architectural Runway and thinking about multiple Horizons of Technology planning is to get ahead of this and gain those insights that will pay off later to ensure that we've got uh good visibility excellent well there you go there's your overview on technical dat you probably knew more about it before we started than I did anyway but now hopefully we're a little bit clearer on on the idea and in the next podcast we're going to explore this topic a little bit more and consider what some the implications of of technical debt might be so don't miss out on that one join us again soon thanks everyone thanks Andy [Music]