The Tech Debt Burndown Podcast S1 E10 - Eoin Woods on Identifying Tech Debt
Jun 13, 2021
Eoin Woods, CTO at Endava and co-author on software architecture, shares hard-won experience with technical debt. He discusses academic vs industry research, using large-scale GitHub studies, and why tracking debt in tickets changes behavior. He talks deprecation, prioritization, security as debt, and practical practices like automated analysis and heat maps.
AI Snips
Chapters
Books
Transcript
Episode notes
Endava And Eoin's Background
- Eoin Woods introduced his background as CTO at Endava with ~30 years bridging industry and academia.
- He described Endava as a large digital engineering services firm working across design, build, security, and operations.
Technical Debt Is Context-Specific
- Technical debt research began as practitioner interest and moved into formal academic conferences with peer-reviewed work.
- Eoin warns technical debt is context-specific and resists universal mathematical models.
GitHub Data Has Selection Bias
- Many academic studies use GitHub as a data source, producing strong quantitative findings from vast code histories.
- Eoin cautions about selection bias: open-source behavior may not represent large corporate systems.
