InfoQ: Technical Debt Is Now Costing Us $3.61 Per Line Of Code

InfoQ: Technical Debt Is Now Costing Us $3.61 Per Line Of Code:

CAST now estimates technical debt to cost companies $3.61 per line of code.

35% of those items considered to be technical debt were severe enough to adversely affect support of the system studied, potentially resulting in security, performance or uptime issues.

Outsourced and in-house developed applications didn’t show any difference in structure quality.  The same was true for onshore and offshore applications.

Java EE applications were the most prevalent among those studied and received significantly lower performance scores as well as carrying greater technical debt than other languages.

Established development methods such as agile and waterfall scored significantly better in structural quality than custom methods, while waterfall scored the highest in transferability and changeability.

COBOL applications scored the highest in security, while .NET applications received the lowest security scores.

Modularity of systems may contribute to lower quality and reduced performance.

Government systems tend to be the lowest in maintainability.

The more frequently the code is released the higher the technical debt.

Why software is better

1. Automatic update/cloud deployment
2. Crash recovery
3. Reduction of dependencies through standards
4. Continuous build/integration/release/test
5. Initial code quality
6. Convergence of the user and test community

- James Whittaker. All That Testing is Getting in the Way of Quality 

Alistair Cockburn. Collaboration: the dance of contribution

Key Ideas
Lift others: Be courteous. Lower your social posture. Listen intently. Recognize others.
Increase safety: Be yourself. Donate. Widen the boundary. Support others. Challenge but adopt ideas. Build personal relationships. Don't betray.
Make progress: Success breed success. Say something valuable. Clarify the way forward. Focus. Get a result.
Add energy: Challenge. Contribute.

Mobile-Social-Cloud

Three trends that change business: Mobile, Social and Cloud

"We are at the beginning of the next twenty years of IT evolution.  These trends will combine to create the biggest technology shift since the Internet.  Successful companies will use these technologies to transform the business."

Creativity Patterns

Creative Thinking Hacks by Scott Berkun
and implementations in SW development.

1. Journal
Backlog, Test List, To Be Improved part of Retrospective, Futurespective

2. Escape
Focus-Manna, Pomodoro, Break

3. Invert
If you're stuck, come up with ideas for the opposite of what you want
Assert First, Test First, DIP?, IoC?

4. Partner
Can't find a partner? Find a rival.
Pair Programming, Mentoring/Coaching, Peer Code Review, Coding Dojo

5. Fail
The first draft of anything is shit
-Ernest Hemingway
Prototyping, Spiking

6. Switch Modes
If stuck: find new way to represent the problem, using a
different mode of communication.

The test automation pyramid

Mike Cohn, Succeeding with Agile, 2009: 

70-513

Today passed the exam with 975/1000