We often consider technical debt, the amount of technical debt risk, a decision that we can make at the beginning of a project or a significant piece of work. But consider a successful publicly sold application at the time of the Sydney Olympics in 2000 which probably consisted of a simple client server architecture of a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database with a Visual Basic 6 client. Half-yearly updates were mailed to customers in the form of a CD that the customer installed.
Today that successfully scaled application is now a Cloud Native application using serverless functions and a microservices architecture being consumed by mobiles, tablets, desktops, Internet of Thing devices with significant third party integration.
The intervening advances in technologies and architectures have imposed significant technical debt on that application from the turn of the century. If this externally imposed “structural” technical debt had not been confronted the application would still consist of a MS SQL Server 2000 database and Visual Basic 6 client and half-yearly CD mailouts. How long would that application have survived?
About Stephen
Stephen Smith (does not often get the opportunity to talk about himself in the third person in which his personal pronouns could be me , myself and I!!) came to IT development from a commercial accounting background and still maintains his CPA status (one of the two professional accounting bodies in Australia). He sees himself as essentially a user with developer skills able to see problems and opportunities from both the user and development team perspective and in so doing seeks to be a bridge between the communities. The objective of IT development is essentially delivering business value to application stakeholders.
Stephen has been a regular at Sydney Alt.Net since its early days. We're grateful that Stephen has stuck with the group for so long and decided to give a talk to round out the year off.
Stream at: https://www.twitch.tv/sydneyaltnet