Where are the WarGames students?

This morning I happened to enjoy "What's the point of ..." on BBC Radio 4. Motivated by an imminent spending review and inevitable cuts – as well as recent celebrations concerning the Battle of Britain – Quentin Letts put the RAF under some scrutiny. What's the point of the RAF in 2010? The issues and debates are well rehearsed, e.g. Are über futuristic fighter jets required for the conflicts the UK is likely to be engaged in? The outcome of the debate was inconclusive because few people can predict the types of conflicts that may emerge in the future.

One type of warfare which all commentators agreed was potentially imminent is cyber warfare. Not only is such warfare potentially imminent, but the UK (along with other NATO allies) is completely unprepared for a sophisticated or sustained attack. According to the programme only 24 people at the MoD are actively working on cyber security(!). Commentators agreed that funding had to be diverted from other armed services (i.e. RAF) to invest in cyber security. This means more advanced computing and information professionals to improve cyber security, but also to operate un-manned drones, manipulate intelligence data, and so forth. 'More Bill Gates-type recruits and fewer soldiers' was the message.

Although it wasn't given treatment in the programme, the conundrum for our cyber security – as well as our economy - is the declining numbers of students seeking to study computing science and information science at undergraduate/postgraduate level. This is a decline which is reflected more generally in the lack of school leaver interest in science and technology, something which – unless you have been living in a cave – the last Labour government and the current coalition are attempting to address. With the release of A-level results today and the massive demand for university places this year, some universities have been boosted by government grants designed to recruit extra students in science and technology. The coalition, in particular, sees it as a way of improving economic growth prospects; but it seems that the need to reverse this trend has become even more urgent given that we only have a small mini-bus full of 'cyber soldiers' – and, let's face it, five are probably on part-time contracts, two will be on maternity leave and one will be on long term sick leave.

It's a far cry from the 1980s Hollywood classic, 'WarGames' (1983). WarGames follows a young hacker (Matthew Broderick) who inadvertently accesses a US military supercomputer programmed to predict possible outcomes of nuclear war. Taking advantage of the unbelievably simple command language interface ("Can we play a global thermonuclear simulation game?" types Broderick) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) light years ahead 2010 state of the art, Broderick manages to initiate a nuclear war simulation believing it to be an innocent computer game. Of course, Broderick's shenanigans cause US military panic and almost cause World War III. I remember going to the petrol station with my father to rent WarGames on VHS as soon as it was available (yes – in the early 1980s petrol stations were often the place to go for video rentals! I suppose the video revolution was just kicking off...) and being thoroughly inspired by its depiction of computing and hacking. I wanted to be a hacker and was lucky enough to receive an Atari 800XL that Christmas, although programming soon gave way to gaming. Pac-Man anyone? Missile Command was pretty good too...

Getting into technical debt in a recession?

I like this succinct quote from TalkTalk CIO David Cooper about the IT systems in newly acquired Tiscali.

"In addition, Tiscali faced some IT issues in the past and worked pragmatically to fix them, resulting in some discontinuities between systems – we are repairing this now," www.computing.co.uk/computing/analysis/2252848/ringing-changes-talktalk-4893004

There are, no doubt, times to go for the cheapest, quickest most 'pragmatic' solution to getting systems to mesh together. But in getting to a solution for least cost there can be an accumulation of 'Technical Debt'. I know that one of my clients in my day job, keeps a measure of technical debt being accumulated in development projects. But it is difficult to persuade an organisation to contemplate such debt, let alone put it on the balance sheet.

It's never easy either to argue for spending money on technical debt when you can have new shiny functionality baubles. What we find we do at Village Software when working on clients projects is try to improve things as we go along. Most clients would not be happy if we suggested they spent 10’s of thousands refactoring a system with little or no functional gain. Hence I suspect we often do this on the cheap out of a possibly misplaced or at least poorly negotiated sense of professionalism. We have recently spent a five figure sum refactoring our Lab Solution to improve it under the hood, I've got to say this hurts and we are now on a functionality campaign.

I wonder what the effect of the current recession is on technical debt. In principle resources to deal with it are cheaper than in a boom time. However the need to gain the cost reducing, innovation gaining benefits of Business Information Systems at lower investments will surely lead to an increase in technical debt across the economy. Perhaps the UK is accumulating billions of technical debt in the public and private sector to match the vast national debt in the public sector and the balance sheet retrenchments in the private sector.

The term 'Technical Debt' by the way was coined by Ward Cunningham as a useful allegory. One of the great thinkers in current software development Martin Fowler describes it on his Wiki martinfowler.com/bliki/TechnicalDebt.html. He explains that getting things done, in a way TalkTalk's David Cooper describes generously as pragmatically, is like borrowing money, you have to start paying interest, eventually you have to pay it back along with the principal. Ward Cunningham has a neat little 4 point plan referring to technical debt in software development. (For those not familiar with the term, refactoring is the practice of improving software code quality without adding functionality). Cunningham describes technical debt on his Wiki (all these guys have wikis) www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?ComplexityAsDebt :-

• Skipping design is like borrowing money.

• Refactoring is like repaying principal.

• Slower development due to complexity is like paying interest.

• When the whole project caves in under the mess, is that like when the big guys come round and slam your hands in the car door for not paying up?

Others describe it by the allegory of lactic acid building up on your muscles during a run. In the wider world of Commercial and Government ICT we can expect a build up of such debt. For businesses without a strategic plan for ICT, the resources to deliver a plan or whose plan is to accumulate technical debt there is going to be a backlog. Alas 'Technical Debt' will not be appearing on balance sheets soon if indeed there were a way to measure it. I would be baffled if a student asked how to go about measuring technical debt in his company.

I have a feeling that the Information Systems people, like me, will somehow get the blame for letting such debt accumulate.

Life can be unfair, but it is indoor work no heavy lifting.