Benjamin Kowarsch

Tokyo (JPN)
Role(s):
Founder/Owner/Principal

Solving the Problem of Technical Debt

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Location: San Jose
Industry: Software
Year Founded: 2018
Number Employees: 1-10 people
Business Stage: Creation/Idea
Entity Type: Not Incorporated
Description: Synopsis: This opportunity is about a by-product of a non-profit research project. Whilst the research project itself is about education, the by-product that is proposed for commercialisation is a software quality management methodology and tool. I am an electrical engineer, software developer and project manager and I have worked during my free time for the last 8 years on a non-profit project with a university in Canada to develop their next-generation software education methodology and associated tools. As a by-product of this non-profit work I have developed an innovative and ground breaking methodology for the automated and continuous measurement of TECHNICAL DEBT in real-time. Technical debt is a huge problem in the software industry. It is the white elephant in the room. One knows its there, one knows its big, but one does't talk about it in polite company. Technical debt leads to unreliable software. Technical debt leads to unsafe software. As technical debt increases over time -- and it always does -- it decreases the maintainability and future adaptability/extensibility of software. Although technical debt has been recognised as a problem and given its name already in the early 1990s, no methodology has thus far been developed and adopted to measure it in any practical realiable continuous manner. Yet, that which cannot be measured cannot be managed. And thus technical debt keeps increasing everywhere and our software keeps getting less reliable, more vulnerable to security threats and less and less maintainable. The methodology I have developed measures technical debt in real-time every time the source code of a software project is compiled into executable code, furnishing actionable reports that will allow management to set budgetable targets for the gradual reduction of their technical debt by X percentage points over Y time. The methodology can be applied to software projects in any programming language. The reporting component and a large part of the measurement component of the measurment and reporting tool can be shared between programming languages. Only a small part of the measurement component needs to be rewritten for each language. The focus of the aforementioned non-profit project is on education and the university does not have the funds that would allow the technical debt management method to be developed into an industry tool. From the perspective of the university, it is simply one of many items to feature in their curriculum. Without funding I won't be able to develop this methodology into a commercial tool, nor even a universally applicable not-for profit open source tool. I am therefore looking for early stage investors who are willing to help me to develop this particular aspect of my long standing non-profit work into a commercial product. The open source tool under development in cooperation with the university is very basic since it is for teaching and is integrated into a compiler for a language that is only used for education and does not have any commercial use. The commercial tool I envisage should go beyond basic principles and it should target Microsoft's C# and Oracle's Java languages since those account for the bulk of commercial software today. Considering how serious the problem of technical debt is in the industry and considering that nobody seems to have any idea how to solve it, this has the potential to become the next PeopleSoft or the next SAP. The initial funding requirements are modest. To develop a working tool for C# and Java, I envisage a small team of two, maximally three developers, including myself to work full-time for about a year on documentation/specification, implementation and acceptance testing. If you find this of interest, please contact me for a more in-depth discussion.