Communicating technical debt
Explaining technical debt to non-developers can be challenging. Even when management trusts the development team, it is difficult for managers to understand what engineers deal with or how technical debt slows the software engineering process and introduces tremendous quality risks whenever the application is changed.
Technical debt as risk
In the course of my career, I’ve learned that while management has trouble understanding technical debt, there’s something they have a much better understanding of: risk.
This may sound strange, but I’ve found the best way to help management understand technical debt is to present it in terms of risk management.
Every aspect of technical debt in your system has both a probability and an impact.
The probability of a piece of technical debt is the likelihood that the piece of technical debt will impact the development team during development or when the application is running in production...
