velocity

Metrics, Plumb Lines, and System Thinking

Friday morning I was at a seminar taught by Jason Taylor, CTO at Allegiance. We were discussing how dev team velocity and product quality can compete for our attention; sometimes we trade one for the other. Jason mentioned that he’s a fan of competing metrics, and some neurons connected in my brain.

Plumb line suspended from the center point of multiple balancing legs. Photo credit: suttonhoo (Flickr)

I’m a big believer in measurement. As the old adage goes, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. Next time someone urges you to change a behavior, or tells you she’s going to, ask what measurement of change is being proposed. If you get an unsatisfying answer, I predict you’ll also get an unsatisfying outcome.

I’m also a big believer in balance, as I’ve written about before. Good software balances many considerations.

Besides these existing predispositions, I’d recently read a blog post by Seth Godin, cautioning about the need to choose wisely what we measure. And I’ve been digesting The Fifth Discipline, by Peter Senge, which advocates wholistic, systemic thinking, where we recognize interrelationships that go well beyond simplistic, direct cause-and-effect.

All of these mental ingredients Continue reading →

Tech Debt, Leverage, and Grandma’s Envelope

In my previous posts about tech debt, I focused on how we can help organizations remember their debts, and on understanding how tech debts are funded and paid back.

Photo credit: Friends of the Earth International (Flickr)

Photo credit: Friends of the Earth International (Flickr)

These topics hit a raw nerve with coders and testers. Those in the trenches often feel very keenly the cost of doing things in a messy way, and it’s common for them to worry that others don’t “get it.”

They’re not wrong to worry.

However, today I’d like to put on my executive hat and discuss tech debt from a perspective that code jockeys sometimes miss, because blindness is not just an executive disease.

Debt as Leverage

When you hear the word “leverage” in business circles, people are talking about debt: a “highly-leveraged” firm is one financing large portions of its strategy through debt; “leveraged buyouts” are transactions where the buyers borrow vast sums of money from a risk-taking lender to take a company private.

Technogeeks (like me): business people are not dumb. Why did they settle on this metaphor of debt as leverage?

The answer is that debt can allow a company to concentrate enough capital in a short enough timeframe to make high-impact strategic moves that would otherwise be impossible. It’s an enabler and multiplier.

Another take on leverage. Image credit: xkcd.

Debt is a fundamental machine in the business toolkit, just as levers are a fundamental machine for mechanical engineers. Almost all businesses use debt to some extent. If a CEO can borrow capital at 9% and produce 12% ROI with it, and Continue reading →