You are buried under a mountain of debt. You are anxious and feel like you are being set up for failure but you can’t pinpoint why. It’s preventing you from building your dreams. It’s making stakeholders unhappy. Every feature is a nightmare to build and you doubt yourself. The development team is about to stage an armed revolt. Your software is rotting under you and it’s going to cause a premature death for your product. How did things get this bad and what should we do about it? Or, even better, how do we prevent it from ever getting this bad in the first place? How do we start eating that tech debt elephant?

Understanding how tech debt is holding back your business objectives will help you start digging out and creating a better product for everyone. This session will help you articulate what debt you have, formulate a plan for addressing it, and communicate that in business friendly terms. All systems have tech debt. Not all tech debt is made equal and not all of it can, or should, be addressed. It’s time we start talking honestly about what debt is, how it affects the product, and what to do about it.

Key takeaways:
• Evaluate how tech and product debt are impeding your vision and business objectives
• Learn tools to build your own debt backlog, prioritize debt against features, and socialize debt solutions
• Discover simple ways to communicate effectively about tech debt within your organization

Given at KCDC 2021, CodeMash 2023