Three Kinds of Good Tech Debt
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Three Kinds of Good Tech Debt
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Re: Three Kinds of Good Tech Debt
#2As I’ve gotten more senior in my career, I think one of the most enlightening things has been anticipating debt before it happens (in planning/architecting), acknowledging it when it does and then taking prudent measures to minimize it and log it for future refactoring.
It’s also been funny seeing managers try to rebrand tech debt with other business speak like “tech health”. Debt shouldn’t be a bad thing but one that’s anticipated and respected.
Re: Three Kinds of Good Tech Debt
#3I'm not sure if I'd even consider these things tech debt. I tend to distinguish between:
1. Unfinished/unpolished implementations 2. Implementations that are architectural flawed, such that fixing them requires throwing away the existing code.
Issues in (2) are a lot more problematic than issues in (1).
Re: Three Kinds of Good Tech Debt
#4As I’ve gotten more senior in my career, I think one of the most enlightening things has been anticipating debt before it happens (in planning/architecting), acknowledging it when it does and then taking prudent measures to minimize it and log it for future refactoring. It’s also been funny seeing managers try to rebrand tech debt with other business speak like “tech health”. Debt shouldn’t be a bad thing but one tha…
The term "debt" is really helpful. It also explains that while you can pay off debts by taking on other debts, there is a good reason why this is illegal (if done with money) in the real world.
Technical debt in your solution is fine. Running a Ponzi scheme in your solution isn't.
Re: Three Kinds of Good Tech Debt
#5As I’ve gotten more senior in my career, I think one of the most enlightening things has been anticipating debt before it happens (in planning/architecting), acknowledging it when it does and then taking prudent measures to minimize it and log it for future refactoring. It’s also been funny seeing managers try to rebrand tech debt with other business speak like “tech health”. Debt shouldn’t be a bad thing but one tha…
"Health" of a system isn't synonymous with debt. It's what happens when debt isn't respected and becomes bad. Debt is a tool; health is a state. If you carry six months of salary as credit card debt,a financial advisor isn't going to talk about how you're using debt as a tool, they're going to talk about your "financial health".
Re: Three Kinds of Good Tech Debt
#6Two points I really enjoyed:
> Not Fixing All the Edge Cases
We’ve all seen bugs that occur so rarely, and fixing requires destroying some part of the original design architecture. The ability to acknowledge these types of bugs as not worth fixing is liberating.
> Err on the side of building too little because you can always build more later. Build things to be easy to throw away and replace;
I find developers tend to really dislike throw away code or temporary solutions knowing they might break in the future. If the quick hack is well documented, written in a very encapsulated and removable way, who cares about removing it later.
Re: Three Kinds of Good Tech Debt
#7[deleted]
Re: Three Kinds of Good Tech Debt
#8Nice article.
The code review articles are good too: https://engineering.squarespace.com/blog/2019/code-review-cu... https://engineering.squarespace.com/blog/2019/code-review-cu...
Re: Three Kinds of Good Tech Debt
#9I prefer the definition of technical debt being an uncovered call option: at some point the debt will come due and you don’t have anything in place to mitigate the issues it will cause and may not know when it will come due. This debt might look like a manual deploy process, a lack of automated testing, insufficient alerting, no rate limiting on public endpoints, etc. These are things that are fine and then when they’re not, they interrupt the schedule and require urgent and immediate attention.
Bad architecture can cause urgent issues and it can also impact new feature development. The debt is a barrier that makes new features either take much longer than they should or make them just infeasible from a business standpoint. This can exist in both technical architecture or information architecture (i.e. you chose the wrong model and now it’s too engrained across everything to change).
Re: Three Kinds of Good Tech Debt
#10Another kind of good tech debt I was hoping to see here is when something is built somewhat poorly/quickly because it will give you information that you need to have in order to know whether it's worth building it any better.