[Pycon] [new paper] "Tania Allard" - Good code documents itself and other lies

[info a pycon.it]

Title: Good code documents itself and other lies
Duration: 45 (includes Q&A)
Q&A Session: 15
Language: en
Type: Talk

Abstract: Who and why?
This talk is suitable for any developer regardless of their background (software engineering, data science), tools of choice, career stage (junior, senior, team lead, etc.) or business sector.

Abstract
Writing code is hard, making sensible decisions on how to better develop, maintain it, and discard it when its lifetime has come to an end, is harder. In an ideal scenario, the bulk of these decisions will have been made during the early stages and revisited on a periodic basis to evaluate its applicability, keeping our technical debt to the minimum. But what happens when this is not the case? How can we start paying our technical debt while reshaping our team’s development culture? Or how can we communicate the importance of these decisions and best practices to not only the development team but also other teams such as products or sales? How can we reduce our developers' frustration?

This talk explores some of the most common causes of technical debt as well as their impact on the business and product as a whole.  We will revisit some common anti-patterns and behaviours that encourage the accumulation of debt and how to counteract them in an effective way.  It will then explore actionable approaches to repay said debt while embedding these practices within the business culture (or to prevent the formation of huge debts).  

Description
Have you ever heard the term technical debt? Do you often hear phrases such as ‘you do not need to document your code, good code documents itself’ from your peers and technical leaders? Do you feel like you spend more time fixing burning issues than developing robust features? In this talk, we will discuss the many shapes of technical debt and how anyone at any career stage can start paying this within their business while promoting a positive cultural change. 


Tags: [u'development', u'governance']