Agile processes are becoming pervasive and are adopted by most software projects and companies. Identifying and managing Technical Debt in such contexts presents particular challenges, as it is typically the product owner who decides which user stories to prioritize. Thus, it is the PO’s task to balance features with technical debt. Often, features win - leaving the development team with broken windows in their code. Afterwards, the product owner happily moves on to another project, often before the debt’s interest starts to surface.

In this keynote, I will report on experiences and lessons learned from managing technical debt in agile projects. I will highlight challenges from the viewpoint of a small or medium company that develops software for a customer and present insights from a set of agile projects running for up to nine years.

Bio

Dr. Marcus Ciolkowski is Lead IT Consultant and Head of Division at QAware GmbH, an independent software manufacturer and consultancy based in Munich, Germany. QAware analyzes, renovates, invents, and implements software systems for customers whose success heavily depends on IT.

Since 2011, he has been working at QAware, where he has been project lead and principal domain architect for several information systems projects in the telecommunication and automotive domain. He has also been project manager and research lead for several research projects.

His current practical and research interests focus on software quality and developer productivity. This includes Technical Debt, agile software development, software analytics and data engineering, domain engineering for cloud-native applications, and empirical software engineering.