How to Capture and Manage Technical Debt in Agile Development

If you're concerned about the technical debt accumulated by your organization, then consider developing ways to capture and measure it.

In my last post, I suggest teams should target nimble architectures and leverage agile principles that enable iterating on the design. Don't plan to get it perfect, plan to get it wrong, iterate on what you learn, and recognize when the business is impacted by architecture limitations.

Here's one approach agile teams can use to capture technical debt during their planning and commitment process.

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Agile Mindsets: Don't try to get a perfect architecture; Plan to get it wrong

I still find teams that have adopted scrum and other agile practices, but still strive for perfection when trying to conceive architectures and implementation plans. Some will also try to think through every edge case to ensure that designs are fully future-proofed.

This is an unrealistic proposition for most teams and people. There's too many unknowns, too much complexity, and businesses do not give technology times sufficient time to perform exhaustive planning. And as we know, the requirements evolve and new needs materialize.

We're practicing agile to support evolving requirements, yet many want their architectures and technical planning to be prescriptive and comprehensive.

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5 New Year's Resolutions for CIO and Digital Transformation Leaders

Happy holidays and new year everyone! Have your final cocktails of 2018, read up on my driving digital predictions for 2019, and get ready to lead your organizations through what is likely going to be a jittery year of successes, surprises, and necessary pivots.

I'm guessing you have your 2019 plan locked and loaded, but if you're a reader of my book Driving Digital, my articles (here and on InfoWorld and CIO) and the monthly Driving Digital Newsletter, you'll know that roadmaps need ongoing refinement.

So with that, allow me to suggest some new year's resolutions that you might want to bake into your 2019 plans.

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Wishing you a "People First" Happy Holiday!

Wishing you and your family much joy and laughter this holiday season

I look forward to helping you make 2019 exciting and successful!

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What is a "Driver's Voice" meeting?

There was a passionate dialog this past weekend on #CIOChat about whether IT needs steering meetings. If you review the thread on this chat, you'll notice that a number of us oppose the idea of a steering meeting.

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How are you rewarding top performers in digital transformation, data science, agile, and devops programs?

Are you leaving it to HR and once a year performance reviews as your primary way to recognize good performance? Or are you seeking formal and informal ways to let your key employees know they are a good job.

Recognition can come in many forms. For example, it's been a great couple of weeks for me on receiving recognition. Enterprise Mobility Exchange listed me as their top digital transformation expert on Twitter along with Sarbjeet Johal, Evan Kirstel, and Tamara McCleary. Earlier in the week, Thinkers360 listed me in their top 20 global thought leaders in big data along with experts Sandeep Raut, Daniel Newman, Tripp Braden, and others.

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How BigPanda’s “Open Box Machine Learning” enables Autonomous Digital Operations

Are you tired of all the bridge calls, all-hands-on-deck meetings, and operational “war rooms” to manage and resolve the latest outage that’s impacting customers and business users?

Are you frustrated by the endless list of tickets that were generated from different monitoring tools like Nagios, CloudFront, Splunk, Datadog, and others around the same incident?

As applications are now hyper-connected to APIs, microservices, and multiple data sources, do you need better tools to diagnose the root cause of issues faster and more easily? 

These are some of the frustrations of IT Operations and NOC teams that must respond to operational incidents from a growing number of production applications that were newly launched via digital transformation programs, on top of any number of legacy applications that are still business critical. And this is while businesses are demanding more uptime and higher levels of performance because technology has become strategically critical to a larger number of businesses. 

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