Taking out a loan or using your credit card offers short-term advantages in return for long-term costs — debt and interest. Short term decision-making with software has equivalent consequences: ‘get it done by Friday’ often leads to bad code that will accrue interest by making all future tasks take longer.

Programming teams are always under pressure to deliver quickly, so the effect is universal. The resulting ‘technical debt’ is just as deadly to your bottom line as financial debt, but isn’t visible on any balance sheet and so is hard to manage well. Ignored or misunderstood by leadership, tech debt often progressively worsens until the software becomes unmanageable and the company fails.

Learn how technical debt happens, the risks it poses to your company, and how to control and manage it. This talk is aimed more at a management audience than a technical audience.