How to Determine Technical Debt in a Survey

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We asked engineers about their technical debt on a quarterly cadence right? So we asked the engineer, hey, how hindered were you by technical debt in Q1? That's a long time. And then we have to go back and say, like, well, which parts of the code base did they touch in those three months? There was a few metrics that I was hoping might actually correlate, but I was also not terribly surprised, but nothing did. The bigger surprise to be honest for me on the entire tech debt stuff was just the fact that we could find 10 different types of tech debt. We talked about trying to like hone in on specific change lists and self reported technical debt challenges

This week we’re joined by Ciera Jaspan and Collin Green, who lead the Engineering Productivity Research team at Google. Ciera and Collin have written several papers from studies they’ve conducted, and this discussion covers the insights from their research as well as their work more broadly at Google.

Discussion points:

(1:19) About the Engineering Productivity Research team
(3:57) How the team interacts with the rest of the organization
(5:58) The different backgrounds included on the team
(13:11) How Google measures developer productivity
(18:54) Evaluating discrepancies between qualitative and quantitative data
(28:40) Google’s quarterly developer survey
(32:02) Distributing survey results back to the organization
(40:25) Misunderstandings about surveys
(43:51) Ciera and Collin’s paper on why measuring productivity is difficult
(50:35) Reductionist metrics for measuring productivity
(55:26) Examples of other fields that have struggled with measurement
(59:00) Google’s study on measuring technical debt
(1:08:05) Human judgment in measurement

Mentions and links:
Follow Ciera and Collin on LinkedIn
A Human-Centered Approach to Measuring Developer Productivity - Paper, Abi’s summary
Enabling the Study of Software Development with Cross-Tool Logs - Paper
Defining, Measuring, and Managing Tech Debt - Paper, Abi’s summary
Google’s Goals, Signals, Metrics framework - Paper, Abi’s summary