Prioritizing technical debt as if time and money mattered

Adam Tornhill offers an approach that lets you prioritize the parts of your system that benefit the most from improvements so that you can balance short- and long-term goals based on data from how your code evolves. This new perspective on software development will change how you view code.

Many code bases contain code that is overly complicated, hard to understand, and, hence, expensive to change and evolve. Prioritizing the technical debt to pay it off 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 and 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 to make decisions based on data from how the organization actually works with the code? Adam Tornhill offers an approach that lets you prioritize the parts of your system that benefit the most from improvements so that you can balance short- and long-term goals based on data from how your code evolves. This new perspective on software development will change how you view code.