Musings on Tech Debt (2020)

I disagree, the op doesn't consider security heavy industries. Tech debt can result in a lot of financial problems and many ethical ones. Patch your stuff!

Also, I don't usually comment on this sort of thing, but I must be getting old. that font + background was tough to read.

>> Refusing to pay financial debt has ethical implications that refusing to pay tech debt doesn’t have. Paying off tech debt generally involves redoing previous work, destroying previous investment.

You could say that "tech debt" always originates from a lack of understanding or a lack of time (deadlines or rushed work). So the term "debt" is indeed not that helpful to think about it. In the first case, the lack of understanding when trying to create complex systems is most often unavoidable, even for experienced devs. Trying to correct too often too soon will be a problem here too. It's a fine line: too many mistakes accumulate, and you will be unable to make any progress anymore, and the cost of cleaning up everything might be too high. On the other side, trying to clean up everything as the smallest issue is noticed will make it very hard to go through an "exploratory phase" fast enough to gain the required insight, and a lot of issues are only understood once systems are up and running, so you kinda have to try to get there anyway. The better devs you have here, the better they will be able to ride this whole process.

For deadlines and rushed work, I think "technical debt" is pretty fair already. Because while sometimes the result of rushed work is basically the same as the previous case where what you lack is understanding, the process and the context is very different. Many devs will know that what they are doing is not solid, stable progress, and won't be happy about leaving it there forever. It's not a side effect of trying to learn, but instead trying to deliver, and that makes people much more uncomfortable. Also, it's much less gratifying having to work hard when you know what you are doing is not even good progress, but just a crutch. In the side of context, there's also the fact that on a rush there's often poor planning and goals are prioritized without much consideration for the path to reach them. The lack of a clear path has consequences. So I think that although code can be "equally bad" on both situations, there are significative differences, and maybe we should treat each case separately. You really need to reserve some time after sprints and rushed work if you want to keep moving ahead confidently afterwards. So "debt" doesn't seem wrong there.

That being said, things do change with time and team scale too. I am responsible for some code that is > 10 years old, and the way things are done have changed - some things down to fashion, some things down to the skills in the team and some things down to the size of the team. As such, we need to refactor and bring it up to the latest building regs.

Sometimes I’ve put off writing the unit test (in an area of the code that has been around for months or years w/ little or no testing.) and made a bug fix or small feature. I had a plan to revisit it when coming back to the same zone and did.

I’ll justify it like this. If a system is not well-modularized for testing and there isn’t a precedent for mocking or similar methods in that area, rushing to write tests can lead to test-induced design damage.

If I walk away from the code a bit somehow it gets reprocessed in my mind and in the meantime I read up on my tools and understand other parts of the system often I come back and find the tests are quick to write and not damaging.

That is, tests written hastily might not be a net positive.

It is much easier to clean up and order things if we do it continuously, because the implied "damage" is much weaker this way. If we think of programs as tools that need care, we might build things that have more longevity. It is also more fun to work with a clean and well ordered system of tools than with something that is messy and chaotic.