Who This Book Is For
This book is aimed squarely at those in the C-Suite. Those of you who look out over a business landscape filled with ever-more-nimble disruptors and potential disruptors, and get queasy in your gut thinking about your glacially slow IT department that just seems intrinsically and irredemiably unequipped to produce with the speed and agility required if your company is going to compete.
For some, Technical Debt has become the phrase that can be dropped into conversations at executive meetings to enhance their 'optics' and their career. For you, that will do no good: to benefit at all, you need to go past that and gain a true understanding of Technical Debt, why and how it is crippling your company, and how you can fight it.
Now here's a book about Technical Deb for you. This book will clear away all the misconceptions, presenting you with a true understanding of what Technical Debt is (actually, what the Technical Debt Curve - the most important and insight-providing distinction, as we'll see - is), and why tackling it is the most impactful thing you can do for your business and the best sleeping pill you can find for those sleepless nights. And it will arm you with a toolkit to tackle that Technical Debt.
Why You Should Read This Book
This book is a cry from the trenches, reaching out past that Iceberg of Ignorance, past all the intervening and distorting hierarchy and middle managers, to help you understand what is actually going on down in the lowly depths of that IT department that so often fills you with a sense of dread (and maybe, let's be honest, sometimes a little loathing). It distills the wisdom gained from years - decades, even - of helping companies battle code maintainability issues, and - from the very moment Ward Cunningham introduced the concept of Technical Debt - helping them use that awesome metaphor in that battle.
Who The Hell Am I?
Hi, I'm Slade Stewart. I was Agile before there was Agile (back when we called the concepts Lightweight Methodologies). I'm currently a Lead Consultant for ThoughtWorks, home of Agile Signatories like Martin Fowler, curator and author of 'Refactoring' and numerous other early-adopter books on Agile Engineering Practices (and progenitor of foundational, important, and insightful Technical Debt concepts such as the Technical Debt Quadrants). I learned Agile directly from other signatories like Kent Beck and Uncle Bob. If you look hard enough, you'll find my voice - minor, inexperienced, and often laughably off-target, but my voice nonetheless - on the C2 Wiki of the early 2000s. This is the ur-wiki by Ward Cunningham, inventor of among other things the wiki itself and the concept of the Technical Debt curve - and the place where lots of the foundational concepts around Agile got hashed out. And as an early (and novice) attendee of OOPSLA events, I was around when he introduced the concept of Technical Debt at OOPSLA92.
And as an early adopter and proponent of Agile, I started my mission to help companies with the Technical Debt curve long, long before most people had even heard the term. I have helped companies across a range of industries and ranging in size from a couple of dozen employees up to multinational corporations (to namedrop, I number among my clients over the years such companies as UPS, ADP, Nasdaq, and many more Fortune-500 names). I have had successes and 'failures', but I determined early on to learn from the 'failures' and soldier on. Or as Ward Cunningham (if you've read this far you should know something about who he is) says, "The only failure is the failure to learn."
And I sincerely hope this book helps you learn, in the area where you likely most need help.
