002 - Technology Whisperers Tech-Debt episode

In this episode Alistair and Sean discuss Technical Debt and Legacy Technologies.

We define what Technical Debt is and is not.

“Not making a decision is making a decision, and usually a bad one.”

We talk about Hardware vs cloud vs software tech debt.

Define good Debt vs bad Debt.

When is deciding to incur tech debt is acceptable.

Impact from Technical Debt to business costs and future capability.

financial impacts  - licensing, TCO (Total cost of Ownership), lockin-cost, write-downs

risks - security, people, business, process

And finally how to deal with Tech Debt

knowing what you have - discovery process

translation - between business and technology

cost/impact to cost/upgrade and cost of delay

financial planning to remediate and impact to business initiatives

Migration options (7)

• rehost
• replatform
• refactor-rearchitect
• repurchase
• retire
• retain

Architecture and roadmaps to deal with Tech Debt

Strategies for preventing future debt

challenges to making decisions

• 1 user still on the system
• monolithic architectures
• unknown devices/systems
• ownership of systems, software, business processes
• financial approvals to remediate
• Stalwarts (server huggers)

Basically an actioned packed episode!