On Wednesday, September 16th, Theo Schlossnagle addressed this year’s DC PHP 2009 conference in his keynote. Given the unique attendee profile of DCPHP, Theo thought it was appropriate to talk “outside of the technical box” and get people thinking about engineering as a discipline.
One of the most commonly misunderstood concepts in the managerial software engineering world today is that of “technical debt.” In his talk, Theo went over the ins and outs of technical debt and drew parallels between technical debt and the more traditional tool that is financial debt. In his address, Theo noted:
"Many practitioners today use the term technical debt as an excuse to over engineer products. At the same time, many product owners insist on schedules and micro-managed deliverables that result in half-baked products that end up being a messy liability. Tomorrow’s software engineers will need to understand technical debt well enough to use it as a tool to maintain competitive advantage.
This year’s DC PHP 2009 conference attendees are better equipped to leverage technical debt as a tool to their advantage and now have a solid set of guidelines to avoid accruing bad technical debt that will plague them later.