Prioritizing Technical Debt To Identify RED CODE | Adam Tornhill In The Engineering Room Ep. 23

Adam Tornhill is an author including of the best selling book, “Your Code as a Crime Scene” as well as multiple other technical books. Adam is a speaker on the international conference circuit.

He is also a programmer with an interesting academic background, holding degrees in engineering and in psychology. He's the founder and CTO of CodeScene where he designs tools for code analysis.

In this Engineering Room episode, Dave Farley and Adam explore working with and prioritising technical debt, how to identify the most important code to fix, "Red Code", developer productivity, as well as lots of other topics that help us to work effectively in large, complex and legacy codebases.

00:00:00 Intro
00:01:09 Code as a Crime Scene
00:03:29 Inspiration: Geographical Offender Profiling
00:04:51 Visualising Risky Code
00:06:42 You Don’t Need to Fix it all!
00:07:56 What Can we Learn?
00:11:00 Red Code
00:15:33 “Quality Code” Means “Easy to Change”
00:18:54 Making Code Quality Relevant to the Business
00:20:30 The CodeScene Tool
00:21:22 “Speed vs Quality” is a Myth!
00:25:04 How Psychology Helps - Visualisation
00:27:40 Where & What are the Problems, & What to Do About Them & In What Order?
00:29:04 Lehman’s Law & Prioritising Tech Debt.
00:31:37 Cost vs Benefit for Tackling Tech Debt
00:32:15 Red Code has 15x More Defects!
00:32:53 Evidence for the Commercial Value of High Quality Code
00:35:10 Internal vs External Quality
00:37:28“Tech Debt” is a Business Problem!
00:43:30 “Brain Classes” & “Brain Methods”
00:47:59 The Value of Abstraction & Refactoring
00:50:57 The Secrets of Maintainable Code
00:53:18 Does Language Affect Quality?
00:55:24 Summary
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#tehcnicaldebt #podcast #softwareengineer

[brownhorsesoftware]

Excellent stuff!! I learned to code by refactoring all the systems I was put in charge of. Operations loved me as everything I took over stopped having problems.

[chrisjohnson]

Adam your talk about being able to snap shot code smells is incredible! I cannot wait to implement some of your ideas at my company, thank you for a being a guest!

[PaulSebastianM]

The code I work on daily definitely looks like a crime scene. A new one I discover daily. 😂

[trignals]

Thinking about Adam's criticism of the word "technical" got me thinking, Effort Debt feels more relatable. The positive aspect of accruing an effort debt is also pretty self evident.

[hiftu]

All I want to know is the content of those post-its in Dave's kitchen. Seems an interesting idea to have post-it on kitchen cupboard doors.

[GaryFuller]

How bizarre. I did Psychology first (a long, long time ago), because I was interested in offender profiling, then decided to study computing and IT in 2018 because I enjoyed creating websites. One problem I have with a class per file looking at other people's codebases is getting to grips with finding said file. Is there a way to make the structure of an application easier to navigate for people learning to develop applications?

[danielwilkowski]

Does the CodeScene only work for Java? Or other languages too?

[MisFakapek]

Again the audio is horrible, like you are in a narrow corridor and the echo is affecting every word. Especially important when your voice has a tendency to "flow" and it makes the effect even more noticeable