Friday, August 26, 2011

Debt Crisis? Which Kind?

I was sniffing around the dusty corners of my LinkedIn profile, and recalled a group that I'd started three years ago when I was at Netflix: Software Quality People Who Run With Scissors.

Seems like I was looking in on the group about once a year, since there were some folks who had asked to join and it had been a year since the last batch of folks was all added at once.

Anyway, I dusted it off and made it an open group. To try and seed the discussion, I posted the following reaction I had to an idea I heard at a recent Meetup:

Agile has the idea of technical debt. An elaboration heard recently resonated with me. There are three kinds: design debt, quality debt and test debt.

Design debt is the more commonly thought of type of technical debt. You're compromising your current work in some way that will affect the future flexibility or maintainability of the system.

Quality debt is just another way to think about bugs in the system. I suppose you could also map them as "unintentional design debt". They are work you can either do now or defer until later, but that deferral has a cost in either maintainability, customer experience or business process disruption.

Test debt was the one that was most interesting to me. This is measured by the total time needed to regress the product after every iteration. This is the most insidious of the three types of debt. If you're developing software in an agile fashion, but you're not building automated tests to support the effort, this debt can grow without bound and it grows very quickly. It becomes either a crushing workload or an exercise in triage as to which parts of the regression suite are most important to run.

You can't ever have a project without some kind of debt (well, you could, but you'd either never ship anything useful or you'd never iterate enough to make it significantly better). However, being aware of how much debt you're carrying and thinking about the cost to your team's productivity is an important exercise.


Friday, August 19, 2011

Moved to Chegg

Today's my one-month anniversary at Chegg. I'm managing the test engineering and release engineering teams. We're doing a lot of interesting work in "helping students save time, save money and get smarter" <-- blatant mention of company mission.

Anyway, I'm looking for Software Engineers in Test to help scale the test engineering efforts to match the growth of the company and the increasing velocity of change. Want to help? Click for the details.