2 years ago

We asked developers from a variety of organizations and industries a simple question: “How long will your application continue to function if you are not allowed to touch its code?” Software is no longer built completely in-house and instead, there is now what is known as the software supply chain.

A common approach to managing technical debt is to make it engineering’s responsibility as part of each scrum sprint (the period when the development team works to complete a set amount of work) and treat it as an implicit cost of the process of enhancing the software.

When software is assembled using components from the software supply chain, maintenance is different as it’s no longer under the control of the developers and is instead tied to changes to third-party software and APIs.

Unlike the technical debt of the past where everyone had a unique set of technical debt and had to understand and address it through individual refactoring, software maintenance as upgrades of common components is repeatable across different codebases.