Mastering Tech Debt with Lou Franco of Greenwave Solution
Technical debt is a reality we all face in software development. It’s something we all manage, constantly making trade-offs about when and how to best tackle it.
Today, we’re diving into the best team practices for addressing tech debt with expert software engineering leader Lou Franco.
Lou is a software product development advisor and independent engineer currently working on a book focused on tackling tech debt. With 30 years of experience in delivering applications for financial institutions, enterprise companies, and startups, Lou has been an integral part of leadership teams at three startups that had successful exits. He also served as a principal engineer at Trello during its acquisition by Atlassian.
In this episode of Scaling Tech, Lou and Arin explore how to manage tech debt effectively through clear team practices, proactive tracking, and essential tools to prevent it.
If you’re wondering how to help your team move through tech debt, this episode is filled with practical tips you can use today. Don’t miss it!
About Guest:
Name: Lou Franco
What he does: He’s an Independent Software Engineer.
Company: Greenwave Solution
Where to find Lou: LinkedIn | Website
Key Insights
⚡What exactly is tech debt? While there are a lot of definitions of tech debt, at its core, tech debt is about how it affects your developers’ workflow and productivity. Lou says, “I think the kinds of things that make it more like tech debt is the more that the benefit of paying it is to developers themselves working on the code, that the more it's about developer productivity, then it's more likely tech debt. The less visible it is to customers and stakeholders, the more it's like tech debt.”
⚡Technical debt can happen naturally as the world changes. Tech debt doesn’t have to be due to rushed coding or bad decisions. It can be a natural consequence of technological progress. Lou says, “If you look up the, let's say, the dictionary definition of tech, it's going to say something like it was a shortcut taken by a developer and or something like that. Thinking about it more like mortgage debt or credit card debt. And actually I kind of reject most of the financial debt metaphor because it makes us think that way. Whereas I think of it more as just it's resistance that's slowing you down, and you care about it because you're trying to go that way.”
⚡Managing technical debt begins with clear practices. When your team has the right practices in place, everything runs more smoothly and allows them to focus on the bigger picture. Lou highlights some of the most important practices, “You have your style guide. Do use tabs, do I use spaces, or how do I use curly braces? That's great. Hopefully, you use automatic formatting to deal with that. But what you also want in there is something that addresses some of your tech debt ideology. [...] I think that's a really important enabling team practice. Another one and this more involves management. We did this on our team at Atlassian [...] we had a segregated PM lead resource allocation and engineering led resource allocation.”
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