Balancing Technical Debt and Clean Code talk at the BCS

date: 2015-02-05 07:14:07

Last week I gave a talk at BCS Dorset about technical debt:

Balancing technical debt and getting things done is one of the hardest problems we have. When should we write beautiful, elegant, clean code and when should we just hammer away blindly at the keyboard until it's done? This talk goes in to why this balance is so difficult and covers everything from estimations to refactoring and testing, with a focus on real world web apps.

This talk was at the BCS (The British Computing Society), so was a bit different from talking at developer user groups (where I've spoken before). It's always interesting giving more subjective talks based more on experience learned than more technical talks that are either right or wrong. The best bit was the Q&A, where there was lots of discussion with other people's experience of technical debt and architecture in startups, digital agencies and enterprises.

I've included the slides below but most of them are visual cues rather than bullet points of information.