A game that teaches you how to leverage and control technical debt!

In software development, technical debt is the cost of rework you need to do, in order to keep a system functional in the long run. It could either be the result of taking shortcuts, which pile up code that you need to come back to later; or, it could also be the result of changing requirements - for example, you have more users than you expected, and now you have performance issues.

However, even though technical debt is often seen as negative, it’s not always a bad thing: The shortcuts you take now might speed up your development, and give you a first-mover advantage.

Like with financial debt, technical debt can create leverage - but only if you balance acquiring debt with paying debt, and only if you make conscious decisions about your debt. Having both too much, and too little technical debt can slow you down!

For example, not having any technical debt probably means that you’re over engineering or doing premature optimisation, slowing down how quickly you ship new features. Similarly, too much technical debt results in stability issues, reduces your speed of delivery, and means you have a lot of code to rework later on.

This game aims to help you understand how to leverage technical debt to your benefit, so you build a successful business. You’ll also learn that too much technical debt might give you success in the short term, but makes you lose in the long term. You need to figure out how to strike a balance! :)

Arjen de Ruiter and Jomiro Eming launched the Technical Debt Game in 2021, a game that teaches you how to leverage and control technical debt! Play for yourself at: https://github.com/arjenderuiter/techdebtgame

Can run this workshop in various time lenghts, though 90 minutes is usually best so we can do a few rounds and do a mini retro in between.