Taming Your Dragon: Addressing Your Technical Debt

Andrew Richard Brown has worked in the software industry since 1999. He started as an SAP programmer fixing Y2K bugs, although he admits that he sometimes inadvertently replaced them with Y-2050 bugs. Later, he realized that the biggest problems in software development were not technical but human. What's more, nobody had yet figured out what to do about them! Since then, he has helped teams improve their performance through understanding and addressing these problems.

Andrew also coaches organizations on software development, quality engineering, and addressing issues driven by human factors. He is particularly active in addressing long-standing issues, like technical debt, risk in complex systems, and project underestimation. He investigates how software development problems are driven by cognitive biases, plus how to address them using behavioral science techniques.

His research has led to new and counterintuitive insights into the true causes of software development problems, as well as fresh approaches to solving them. He is a regular speaker at international software conferences and has a growing YouTube channel dedicated to understanding these problems.