If anyone understands the immediate impacts of technical debt, it’s development teams. Engineers and engineering leaders experience firsthand the slowdowns, the death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts, and in drastic cases, the soul-sucking repercussions of unmanaged technical debt.
But communicating those results to non-technical stakeholders is a challenge. CTOs might understand it if they were once coders themselves. Anyone without intimate or necessary knowledge of the codebase, though, is unlikely to comprehend the pain caused by technical debt. They may simply never understand (from their perspective) why engineers always make messes that need to be cleaned up later.
The key is to reframe technical debt away from the debt itself and into terms that matter to other key stakeholders. That’s how you get organization-wide buy-in for addressing technical debt, as well as the trust that your team is actively contributing to the company’s forward-looking goals.
Here are perspectives on earning that buy-in from three industry leaders: Yvette Pasqua, CTO at Meetup; Andrea Goulet, CEO at Corgibytes; and Rob Zuber, CTO at CircleCI.
Source: How to Get Buy-In for Addressing Technical Debt – DZone Agile