The Tech Debt Burndown Podcast

Krzysztof - Chris - Daniel talks to Nick and Chris about Wardley Mapping and better corporate strategies.

In the Season 1 Finale, Yosef Lehrman talks to Nick and Chris about the Executive Order on Improving the Nation's Cybersecurity.

Allan Friedman of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has long been one of the world's leading proponents of Software Bill of Materials, or SBOM. With the President's Executive Order on Improving the Nation's Cybersecurity, SBOM has begun to receive the wider attention it deserves, and Allan joins Chris and Nick to discuss SBOM and how it can help with tech debt burndown.

Eoin Woods has developed quite a bit of software, and created and dealt with quite a lot of technical debt. He is CTO at Endava, and co-author of two software architecture books. On the Tech Debt Burndown he joins Chris and Nick to talk about his role in the International Conference on Technical Debt and some of the research highlighted in the virtual 2021 edition of that conference, as well as his own personal experiences in the field.

Charity Majors joins Nick and Chris to discuss the difference between observability and metrics, some great insights into good debt (like college loans) versus bad debt (like charging stuff we want on a credit card), and thoughts on efficiency.

With the US closed for Memorial Day weekend, and the UK closed for Spring Bank Holiday, we're firing up the grills, and pausing to reflect. In the next few episodes, we'll discuss toil and build times with Charity Majors, Tech Debt burndown strategies with Eoin Woods, the Biden Executive Order with Yosef Lehrman, SBOMs with Allan Friedman, and much, much more!

On this episode, Chris and Nick are joined by Olivier Jacques, DevOps transformation principal at DXC Technology, who discusses his article, Six Strategies to Set Time Aside to Improve. The six approaches capture some very insightful observations into technical debt burndown.

Lots of things get improved by building continuous delivery pipelines and then going back to them and iteratively making improvements. Pipelines themselves can be a place where we accrue tech debt - even at the entry point to those pipelines. So let's look at branching strategies.

When Wendy Nather began work as an information security analyst, she started asking her CISO friends a question: ‘If you just took a CISO job at a company that had no security, what would you buy?' The answers fascinated her. Now at Duo (Cisco), she set out to formalize research that was released as Cisco Secure's Security Outcomes Study. Wendy discusses the process on this week's podcast.

We've been hearing about software supply chain vulnerabilities quite a bit lately, from Solar Winds to CodeCov. How do these relate to technical debt? Ah, that's a complicated questions, because each of its components are discussing complex things. In this episode, Chris and Nick try to hash it out, and to sort through what's important.