So what is it that we do? This is the question that I find myself constantly answering. My kids ask me, my neighbors ask, and our customers ask me all the time; I think I have finally found an appropriate, although simplistic answer to the question: “We prevent the accumulation of Technical Debt”.

Yes, it is true we write great software.

Yes, we are a Test Driven organization.

Yes, we focus on bridging the gap between Business and IT.

Yes, we focus on Value first.

Yes, we embrace a set of practices that drive our daily and weekly disciplines. But we do so for one simple reason – the prevention of Technical Debt.

When I compare what we do at Pillar with the many other organizations, it usually comes down to the set of practices that allow us to identify and eliminate Technical Debt before it becomes a burden.

Technical Debt is the cancer of the IT world. It is in the database schema in form of tables, indexes, columns that are not used. It is in the extra code that was written that was not needed. It is found in every method or object that was written without a test harness. It is most often found in the 800-page requirements document that embodies the vain attempts of humans to capture business requirements. Technical Debt is the nuisance of society. It is the reason for batch programs to fail at night. It is the reason many programmers loose their hair. Yes, Technical Debt is the evil cancer of our profession.

So it comes down to this simple goal – the early identification and elimination of Technical Debt.

The Agile Practices that we embrace allow us to gain a competitive advantage over those who do not share this world-view. Our understanding of Technical Debt allows us to keep our attention on this age-old problem. If you don’t care about the consequences of Technical Debt, you tend to not worry about its impact. Some people prefer to just allow the next generation of developers to worry with the debt. We cannot assume this position – Our devotion to error free code will not allow it.

Pillar’s success is rooted and established upon the belief that the early identification and elimination of Technical Debt is in fact the pathway to lower overall cost of software construction and longevity.

So there you have it. That’s our secret. I wish I could have a better explanation, but I really believe that it comes down to this simple fact: We achieve our overall success by focusing on the elimination of Technical Debt.

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