In this interview Agile Alliance Board Member Declan Whelan makes the case for reframing Technical Debt and having organizations develop practices and programs supporting Technical Health. During the interview we discuss what technical debt it, how our perception of it has evolved and why taking a more positive and proactive stance for it can be so beneficial for organizations that are trying to improve flow and remain competitive in the marketplace.

Declan also shares details on the Agile Alliance’s OnAgile 2017 virtual conference which is taking place on October 25, 2017.

SHOW NOTES

00:09 Interview Begins

00:36 Background on Declan

02:35 What is Technical Debt?

03:55 How the definition of Technical Debt has evolved

05:11 Impediments to flow

06:15 Why it makes sense to think of Technical Debt as Technical Health

09:42 How does technical debt happen?

11:15 The environment (or system) may be set up to support increased technical debt

13:12 Explaining to management why technical wellness is so important

14:26 Measuring technical health (and debt)

15:58 Explaining the debt in dollars and showing the value of investing in technical health

16:22 How much faster could you go?

17:25 Why Declan enjoys legacy code and why some folks get frustrated with it

19:00 Finding the right people to work on it

20:16 Should technical debt go in the Product Backlog?

20:55 Employing the Boy Scout rule

24:25 Does Leadership and the PMO understand the importance of dealing with technical debt?

26:00 How the PMO can have a positive impact on technical wellness

30:55 OnAgile 2017 - the Online Conference (10/25)

30:04 What is Psychlomatic Complexity?

34:16 The things in Agile that Declan is focusing on learning about

36:00 Contacting Declan

OnAgile 2017 http://bit.ly/2i3G0f6

CONTACTING DECLAN

Leanintuit http://leanintuit.com

Twitter https://twitter.com/dwhelan

LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/declanwhelan/

Agile Alliance https://www.agilealliance.org/