Technical neglect

Many developers evoke the mischievous spirit and day-to-day burden of technical debt to explain the misfortunes and troubles of their codebase and delivery. While unmanaged technical debt weighs down many codebases and exerts drag on their schedules, it is more often an effect than a cause.

In this talk, we will look at what is and is not meant by technical debt — and other metaphors — to properly attribute the root and recurring cause as technical neglect rather than technical debt.

Without seeing technical neglect for what it is, we will continue to misattribute our problems to an effect rather than a cause.

Participant takeaways:

• Technical debt is an effect rather than a cause
• Technical debt is often a misapplied metaphor
• Most unmanaged technical debt arises from technical neglect
• Technical neglect is hard to see because it is a thing that does not happen rather than a thing that does happen

Themes:

Technical Neglect, Technical Debt, Development Velocity, Software Architecture, Software Quality, LLMs