The Tech Debt Burndown Podcast
Chris Swan and Nick Selby, two experienced leaders in technology and information security, explore the often-overlooked challenge of technical debt. They discuss how software and IT systems accumulate long-term costs, and share strategies for identifying, measuring, and reducing that debt. Practical engineering, process, and organizational insights for teams trying to keep their technical foundations healthy.
Episodes
S3E9: Testing Policy Debt
Chris and Nick talk about how organizational growth introduces process inefficiencies and inter-departmental friction, which can be diagnosed and addressed using value stream mapping. They emphasize that automating systems successfully relies on robust exception handling rather than just building for the "happy path," sharing a banking case study where classifying and systematically resolving exce
S3E8: Georg Schleiermacher
Chris and Nick speak with Georg Schleiermacher, former CTO of Hyperloop Spain and veteran of MTU Aero Engines, to explore technical debt in the aviation sector. Georg explains that because aero engines remain in service for up to 50 years with frozen designs, making any changes—even updating a single screw or a computer processor's FADEC software—requires extensive, expensive regulatory recertific
S3E7: Overambitious AI Intern
Nick and Chris explore the behavioral, cultural, and financial implications of deploying AI coding assistants, framing their erratic behavior as that of an "overeager intern" that prioritizes speed over rigor. Sharing recent engineering experiences with Claude, Nick explains how these agents exhibit an almost willful habit of rushing code into production and actively trying to bypass local test su
S3E6: AI Tech Debt
Nick and Chris talk about the security, data privacy, and operational challenges of enterprise AI adoption, highlighting how executive pressure driven by “Fortune front page FOMO” often leads to hasty deployments. Drawing from a presentation by ARM’s Richard Grisenthwaite on trustable AI, they emphasize that the majority of AI security relies on foundational security practices that organizations s
S3E5: Cloud versus On Prem
Chris and Nick dive into the widespread misunderstandings and economic realities of choosing between cloud and on-premises infrastructure. They discuss how cloud service providers have driven organizations to perform “lift-and-shift” migrations that replicate messy data center environments in the cloud. Rather than achieving the promised cost savings and agility, these organizations inherit the sa
S3E4: Sarah Wells
Sarah Wells joins Nick and Chris to talk about the lessons learned from her decade at the Financial Times, and their journey to implementing microservices. The same lessons that informed her book, 'Enabling Microservices Success'. We touch on whether the purpose of microservices is to scale a system, or to scale an engineering organisation. By breaking down monoliths into independent domains, team
S3E3: Matthew Skelton
Team Topologies co-author Matthew Skelton joins Chris and Nick to discuss the relationship between tech debt and cognitive load. Matthew explains that every organization has a finite "cognitive load budget," and technical debt acts as a constant drain on this capacity, creating friction that slows down development and increases operational risk. By framing tech debt in terms of human cognition and
S3E2: AI Coding Assistants
Chris and Nick chat about how AI Coding Assistants have suddenly become very good, maybe even good enough to write 'load bearing' code. So the constraints the existed around producing code have potentially disappeared; but other constraints live on, and we're still finding out what this means for product management.Some time is spent on whether languages and frameworks still matter, and it seems t
S3E1: Ralph Wiggum
After a long hiatus, the Tech Debt Burndown podcast has returned for its third season. Chris Swan and Nick Selby kick off the season with a discussion of what Chris has called Tech Debt as a Service: how we’ve entered the slopper scene, and how we are working with our magical AI coding assistants. We start with a discussion of multi-agent coordination frameworks, one of which is called Ralph Wiggu
S2E4-Gene Spafford
S2E3-Jamie Dobson
S2E2 Andy Ellis
S2E1 Krzysztof "Chris" Daniel
Krzysztof - Chris - Daniel talks to Nick and Chris about Wardley Mapping and better corporate strategies.
S1 E12 - Yosef Lehrman on the Executive Order
In the Season 1 Finale, Yosef Lehrman talks to Nick and Chris about the Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity.
S1E11- Allan Friedman and SBOMs
Allan Friedman of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has long been one of the world's leading proponents of Software Bill of Materials, or SBOM. With the President's Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity, SBOM has begun to receive the wider attention it deserves, and Allan joins Chris and Nick to discuss SBOM and how it can help with tech debt b
S1 E10 - Eoin Woods on Identifying Tech Debt
Eoin Woods has developed quite a bit of software, and created and dealt with quite a lot of technical debt. He is CTO at Endava, and co-author of two software architecture books. On the Tech Debt Burndown he joins Chris and Nick to talk about his role in the International Conference on Technical Debt and some of the research highlighted in the virtual 2021 edition of that conference, as well as hi
Episode 9 - Observability With Charity Majors
Charity Majors joins Nick and Chris to discuss the difference between observability and metrics, some great insights into good debt (like college loans) versus bad debt (like charging stuff we want on a credit card), and thoughts on efficiency.
Episode 9a: Memorial Day/Spring Bank Holiday Weekend
With the US closed for Memorial Day weekend, and the UK closed for Spring Bank Holiday, we're firing up the grills, and pausing to reflect. In the next few episodes, we'll discuss toil and build times with Charity Majors, Tech Debt burndown strategies with Eoin Woods, the Biden Executive Order with Yosef Lehrman, SBOMs with Allan Friedman, and much, much more!
Episode 8: The Six Ways with Olivier Jacques
On this episode, Chris and Nick are joined by Olivier Jacques, DevOps transformation principal at DXC Technology, who discusses his article, Six Strategies to Set Time Aside to Improve. The six approaches capture some very insightful observations into technical debt burndown.
Episode 7-Kenn and Bill
Episode 6-The Flow
Lots of things get improved by building continuous delivery pipelines and then going back to them and iteratively making improvements. Pipelines themselves can be a place where we accrue tech debt - even at the entry point to those pipelines. So let's look at branching strategies.
Episode 5 - The Metrics
Episode 4 - The Report with Wendy Nather
When Wendy Nather began work as an information security analyst, she started asking her CISO friends a question: ‘If you just took a CISO job at a company that had no security, what would you buy?’ The answers fascinated her. Now at Duo (Cisco), she set out to formalize research that was released as Cisco Secure’s Security Outcomes Study. Wendy discusses the process on this week’s podcast.
Episode 3: Supply Chain Attacks and Tech Debt
We’ve been hearing about software supply chain vulnerabilities quite a bit lately, from Solar Winds to CodeCov. How do these relate to technical debt? Ah, that’s a complicated questions, because each of its components are discussing complex things. In this episode, Chris and Nick try to hash it out, and to sort through what’s important.
Episode 2 - Ian Amit
Episode 1 - The Audit
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