Tag: technical debt

Designing a Metric to Detect Big Balls of Mud

Alexander von Zitzewitz Leave a comment

Almost everyone who worked in software development for a while has come in contact with the dreaded big ball of mud (BBoM). If you are not familiar with the term, it describes software systems that have lost their architectural cohesion and suffer from extreme coupling and large cyclic dependency groups. That makes it much harder to do any changes on those systems, because everything is literally connected to everything else. Therefor it requires developers spending almost all their time trying to understand code before they can risk doing changes. And even then, the chance of regression bugs stay pretty high. If a system reaches this state, doing changes becomes so expensive, that rewriting the system from scratch might be cheaper than maintaining the old system. Unfortunately, very often it is not possible to rewrite the system, because the users can’t wait for years for a system replacement. This puts many development organization in a very uncomfortable place.

A big ball of mud visualized by Sonargraph

Read More

Changes to the Sonargraph Dashboard

Alexander von Zitzewitz Leave a comment

The Sonargraph dashboard was designed to give the user a quick overview about several important aspects of software quality. The most important aspects in our opinion are “Architecture” and “Structure”, which are displayed at the top of the dashboard. After some internal discussions we decided that we could improve the metrics in the “Structure” box. Those changes will be rolled out with Sonargraph version 15.2.0, which is expected to be released this week.

Read More

Love your Architecture

Alexander von Zitzewitz 5 Comments

The single best thing you can do for the long term health, quality and maintainability of a non-trivial software system is to carefully manage and control the dependencies between its different elements and components by defining and enforcing an architectural blueprint over its lifetime. Unfortunately this is something that is rarely done in real projects. From assessing hundreds of software systems on three continents I know that about 90% of software systems are suffering from severe architectural erosion, i.e. there is not a lot of the original architectural structure left in them, and coupling and dependencies are totally out of control. Read More

Not all Technical Debt should be Treated Equally

Alexander von Zitzewitz 14 Comments

The metaphor of technical debt is gaining more and more traction. Originally Ward Cunningham used the term for the first time in 1992, describing it like this:

“Shipping first time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite… The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt. Entire engineering organizations can be brought to a stand-still under the debt load of an unconsolidated implementation, object-oriented or otherwise.”

It is quite interesting to see that many promoters of agile development approaches now consider an ongoing management of technical debt as critical for the development of high-quality and maintainable software. This challenges the idea that development decision should almost exclusively be driven by business value because it is quite hard to assess the value of paying back technical debt or investing time into a solid software architecture. It seems to me that the value of managing technical debt and a solid architectural foundation increases more than linear with project size. If your project is just a couple thousand lines of code and the team is just 2 or 3 people  it is relatively easy to add architecture on demand by continuous refactoring. But as soon as we have tens of thousands of code lines, ongoing development of new features and larger teams things become a lot more complicated. In this case the management of technical debt and investments into a solid architectural foundation pay big dividends, as described thoroughly in this research paper.

The problem is how to measure technical debt and focussing on the right kind of technical debt. I will first discuss measuring of technical debt and then delve into the different categories of technical debt and their impact on project outcomes.

Read More