Software Development’s Dirty Secret

Agile

There are many companies consulting about Agile Development, and there’s a long standing movement spearheaded by the OMG supporting it. It’s gone well past the early adopters stage and become pretty much mainstream, replacing the bad old days of waterfall development, to the point where I don’t actually know of any software shops that don’t claim to be doing some sort of Agile.  The underlying thesis is that software requirements change quickly and are hard to define precisely in advance.  This was a response to the bad old days of 5-10 year development projects that were irrelevant by the time they were delivered, if they were delivered at all. Agile development is an old idea that was being talked about in the eighties when I started my development career.

Test Automation 

Test automation came along much later, with more mature software engineering tools and testing frameworks. I started with a text editor, a command line compiler and actual stack overflows long before Stack Overflow was the website you went to for all your problems. Long before there were any websites outside the military.  I’d say it’s only in the first follower stage, as there are a lot of companies I know who are only just getting started with it.  They know they need it but they don’t entirely understand why or how to best use it.

There are now many companies consulting about Automated Testing, Test Driven Development, and Behaviour Driven Development, and many test automation tools vendors popping up on the market, named after various vegetables (and reminding me somewhat of the earlier fad where computers were named after fruit – Anyone else remember the Apricot?) and there’s a movement in the industry about Automated Testing now.  There isn’t quite as much take up of it by the laggards and luddites on the innovation distribution curve, although some of the early adopters have had good results, but it’s starting to ramp up now, as we can see by the number of testing jobs that require automation experience.

The Dirty Secret

So why is pretty much nobody talking about Technical Debt?  It is another old idea that was being talked about back in the 1980’s, and is still relevant today, but nobody talks about it outside development departments.

But, technical debt is the dirty secret in the software development world.  Nobody likes to admit they have any, and yet if you develop software that’s mature enough to be live on at least one customer site, I can pretty much guarantee that you have some.   But I kind of get the feeling that nobody outside the Development team really even believes in it. It’s the invisible elephant in the room.

And yet, technical debt costs the industry trillions every year in wasted resources according to research published by CISQ, and furthermore it’s a major cause of dissatisfaction in the workplace at software companies – and not just for the developers!