Declan Whelan - Technical Health

In this interview Agile Alliance Board Member Declan Whelan makes the case for reframing Technical Debt and having organizations develop practices and programs supporting Technical Health. During the interview we discuss what technical debt it, how our perception of it has evolved and why taking a more positive and proactive stance for it can be so beneficial for organizations that are trying to improve flow and remain competitive in the marketplace. Declan also shares details on the Agile Alliance’s OnAgile 2017 virtual conference which is taking place on October 25, 2017. SHOW NOTES 00:09 Interview Begins 00:36 Background on Declan 02:35 What is Technical Debt? 03:55 How the definition of Technical Debt has evolved 05:11 Impediments to flow 06:15 Why it makes sense to think of Technical Debt as Technical Health 09:42 How does technical debt happen? 11:15 The environment (or system) may be set up to support increased technical debt 13:12 Explaining to management why technical wellness is so important 14:26 Measuring technical health (and debt) 15:58 Explaining the debt in dollars and showing the value of investing in technical health 16:22 How much faster could you go? 17:25 Why Declan enjoys legacy code and why some folks get frustrated with it 19:00 Finding the right people to work on it 20:16 Should technical debt go in the Product Backlog? 20:55 Employing the Boy Scout rule 24:25 Does Leadership and the PMO understand the importance of dealing with technical debt? 26:00 How the PMO can have a positive impact on technical wellness 30:55 OnAgile 2017 - the Online Conference (10/25) 30:04 What is Psychlomatic Complexity? 34:16 The things in Agile that Declan is focusing on learning about 36:00 Contacting Declan OnAgile 2017 http://bit.ly/2i3G0f6 CONTACTING DECLAN Leanintuit http://leanintuit.com Twitter https://twitter.com/dwhelan LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/declanwhelan/ Agile Alliance https://www.agilealliance.org/