Credit Crunch Code – Time to Pay Back the Technical Debt

Technical debt, the cost of putting off good development practices, can cripple a project's velocity, flexibility, and quality.  This presentation will focus on a number of common anti-patterns such as "sensitive tests" which are brittle and overly coupled to odd situations which cause them to fail. Having identified these behaviours, we’ll look at techniques to firstly quantify the impacts via real world costing examples, after which we'll walk through mitigation strategies such as buying components of a solution versus developing everything from scratch.  You'll leave this session with a better idea of how to avoid these pitfalls, and how to pull yourself out of them if you do end up therein.

Gary Short works for DevExpress as the Technical Evangelist on the frameworks team. He has a deep interest in technical architecture, especially in the areas of technical debt and refactoring. Gary is a C# MVP and gives presentations at user groups and conferences throughout the UK.

As well as C#, Gary also has an interest in dynamic languages such as Smalltalk, Ruby and Python as well as iPhone development using Objective-C.

Gary's ducelt tones can also be heard on the SodThis and the CodeCast podcasts.