Development PracticesConference50min
You thought technical debt was bad? Meet design debt!
This talk examines how common best practices like KISS and YAGNI can unintentionally worsen technical debt by masking a deeper issue—accidental design debt. It explores how design debt affects architecture, processes, and business, and offers practical methods to identify, evaluate, and address it before it becomes irreversible.
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Julien TopçuShodo
Josian ChevalierShodo
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Thursday, June 18, 10:10-11:00
Room 1
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In our job, technical debt is probably the most frustrating, draining and tenacious thing we have to fight against. Of course, there are best practices: refactor, aim for simplicity with KISS, avoid over-engineering with YAGNI in order to keep this debt as low as possible. And yet, we never really manage to get rid of it. Worse, it keeps piling up even when we apply those principles, as if it were inevitable.
But what if those very best practices sometimes made the problem worse instead of solving it? Technical debt may be only the visible part of something deeper: accidental design debt. A far more complex problem that leads to spaghetti software and microservices that are really just a distributed monolith, and that we often create ourselves without even realizing it.
In this talk, we will explore the mechanisms of design debt and its impact on our architecture, our processes, our organization, and even our business. Through concrete examples, we will see how to detect it, assess how deep it goes, and act before it becomes entrenched for good.
But what if those very best practices sometimes made the problem worse instead of solving it? Technical debt may be only the visible part of something deeper: accidental design debt. A far more complex problem that leads to spaghetti software and microservices that are really just a distributed monolith, and that we often create ourselves without even realizing it.
In this talk, we will explore the mechanisms of design debt and its impact on our architecture, our processes, our organization, and even our business. Through concrete examples, we will see how to detect it, assess how deep it goes, and act before it becomes entrenched for good.
Julien Topçu
Julien is a CTO and hands-on technical coach with 15 years+ of experience, specializing in Domain-Driven Design (#DDD). His expertise lies in helping organizations build systems that deliver high business value. Julien focuses on aligning organizational structure, architecture and software practices with business objectives. As a member of the OWASP foundation, he actively promotes application security best practices. An international speaker, Julien enjoys sharing his knowledge with others.