Discipline, determination, a highly visible area, and a few sticky notes, are all you need to move beyond problems with technical debt.

Target Audience: Developers, Project Leader, Designers, Product Owners, Decision Makers
Prerequisites: Basic Knowledge of Software Development Process
Level: Basic

Extended Abstract:
## Making great software is challenging
It doesn't matter how qualified a team is, it will never be able to produce perfect, flawless, entirely bug-free software.
While teams are discovering how to build the right software in the right way, the environment the team operates in changes.
This results in a constant reorientation of the product, and the corresponding software solution, which will cause gaps between how things work, and how they should work.
Unfortunately, the market won't wait infinitely until teams have addressed these issues in the software, and organizations tend to run out of patience too.
That is why teams often have to move forward with designs and code that are ... let's call them sub-optimal.
These gaps, they are technical debt: a loan against the future, where things will be fixed, at some point ... Hopefully.
According to a global survey performed by Stripe, Inc. amongst software engineers in 2018, researchers found that **engineers estimate to spend 17,3 hours per week on addressing technical debt**.
That same research established that developers work about 41.1 hours per week. With that in mind, addressing technical debt constitutes well over a third of the time a typical engineer spends per week.
**If engineers are spending that much time, how could they better utilize their attention?**
Why do they seem unable to gain control over this metric and push it downwards?
While technical debt sounds nice and predictable: "you just have to pay interest", it really is like a loan with a mobster, and not with a bank.
It will show up unannounced at your doorstep at 3.30 in the morning, demanding that you pay up now!
How can you prevent being surprised by this goon?! And what can you do to leverage the benefits of borrowing against the future?
Because when the conditions are right, taking out a loan and paying it back Tomorrow might just help you ship a better product today.

## Imagine...
- A lightweight process to discover technical debt without a big investment up front
- A data-driven approach to identify the technical debt that needs attention right now
- A system that is easy to introduce, and simple to enforce
- Something that will guide engineers to articulate technical debt in terms of our roadmap
- Which will ultimately improve the flow of work in your organization

## The Wall of Technical Debt™️
A few years ago [Mathias Verraes coined the term "_The Wall of Technical Debt_"][1]. During this presentation Marijn Huizendveld will show you how to institute such a process for managed technical debt. Doing so will provide you with a safety net that allows you to make "naive" design choices every now and again to ship your ideas as fast as possible, without sacrificing sustainable delivery in the long run.
[1]: verraes.net/2020/01/wall-of-technical-debt/

Even in the time of agile software development and devOps, maintenance and evolution of large-scale software systems remain challenging. This is not only caused by technical debt, but is heavily caused by lost knowledge, high complexity of micro-service architectures, difficult requirements management, not available documentation, and the complexity of communication among and coordination of the many stakeholders. In our session we will talk about the challenges we identified in our study and present new approaches to address these challenges.

Target Audience: Architects, Developers, Project Leader, Manager, Decision Makers
Prerequisites: Project Management Experience, Software Maintenance
Level: Expert