Technical Debt Is a Myth
medium.com
Technical Debt Is a Myth
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Re: Technical Debt Is a Myth
#2"Taking out an organisational mortgage should be a deliberate choices. It has costs, interest, pros, and cons."
I could not agree more.
Re: Technical Debt Is a Myth
#3"Taking out an organisational mortgage should be a deliberate choices. It has costs, interest, pros, and cons." I could not agree more.
It seems like they are trying to do otherwise but I see this article as perpetuating the basic problem with "technical debt" which is the analogy with debt. But what do you expect from an article on Medium?
If you take on debt the bank is going to question if you can pay it. You're going to have to go through a formal process and bring in expensive experts such as accountants to justify that taking on debt is worthwhile.
Most "technical debt" is blundered into out of ignorance. Nobody sits down and thinks "we can save two hours now at the cost of three hours later" because it would probably take four hours to do the calculation. Sometimes it really is like that but frequently it is like "we can save two hours now at the cost of of two months later", such as when people make an incorrect database design that involves cleaning up corrupt data later on. Cases like that dominate the cost of "technical debt" to the point where the 2 hours now, 3 hours later cases just don't matter.
Re: Technical Debt Is a Myth
#4"Taking out an organisational mortgage should be a deliberate choices. It has costs, interest, pros, and cons." I could not agree more.
It seems like they are trying to do otherwise but I see this article as perpetuating the basic problem with "technical debt" which is the analogy with debt. But what do you expect from an article on Medium? If you take on debt the bank is going to question if you can pay it. You're going to have to go through a formal process and bring in expensive experts such as accountants to justify that taking on debt is worthwh…
> Nobody sits down and thinks "we can save two hours now at the cost of three hours later"
Perhaps not, but there're plenty of times you realise the "proper" solution that's going to leave you with well-structured code that's easy to maintain and easy to extend to likely future functionality is going to take weeks, whereas a quick'n'dirty solution that will get a bug fixed or an MVP-version of a feature implemented could be done in a few hours, and the latter option makes sense even from a technical POV because there's little certainty that the extra effort will pay off (esp. if it involves higher risk of breaking existing functionality, which is often the case). Unfortunately it's the accumulation of such decisions and lack of time to go back and revise decisions/rewrite code that lead to unwieldy and bug-ridden codebases.
Re: Technical Debt Is a Myth
#5"Taking out an organisational mortgage should be a deliberate choices. It has costs, interest, pros, and cons." I could not agree more.
It seems like they are trying to do otherwise but I see this article as perpetuating the basic problem with "technical debt" which is the analogy with debt. But what do you expect from an article on Medium? If you take on debt the bank is going to question if you can pay it. You're going to have to go through a formal process and bring in expensive experts such as accountants to justify that taking on debt is worthwh…
Isn’t the point of using the phrase “technical debt” that you should be doing this? It’s an idealistic phrase, not one that’s supposed to apply to every organization.
Re: Technical Debt Is a Myth
#6I'm not sure what what to think of the article because I think the definition he chose for technical debt is extremely reductive.
No, technical debt does not only come from taking shortcuts. I would even go as far as saying that most of the time it does not come from taking shortcuts.
- You wrote a perfectly engineered system in Cobold 30 years ago that was state of the art then? Well, now all your Cobold developers have retired and you need to add new features to that tool. It's tech debt.
- Your tool was built to support 100 users but now it needs to support 100M? It's tech debt.
- You were getting some data from the Google Stadia API? Tech debt.
- You're using a library that just got an important security update? Tech debt.
As another commenter pointed out, the term "debt" was wrongly chosen. It's not debt. It's stuff that used to be perfectly fine and due to no fault of yours is not anymore.
Re: Technical Debt Is a Myth
#7I'm not sure what what to think of the article because I think the definition he chose for technical debt is extremely reductive. No, technical debt does not only come from taking shortcuts. I would even go as far as saying that most of the time it does not come from taking shortcuts. - You wrote a perfectly engineered system in Cobold 30 years ago that was state of the art then? Well, now all your Cobold developers…
Technical entropy.
Entropy is unavoidable is the outcome of any work occurring.
Re: Technical Debt Is a Myth
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like they are trying to do otherwise but I see this article as perpetuating the basic problem with "technical debt" which is the analogy with debt. But what do you expect from an article on Medium? If you take on debt the bank is going to question if you can pay it. You're going to have to go through a formal process and bring in expensive experts such as accountants to justify that taking on debt is worthwh…
Isn’t the point of using the phrase “technical debt” that you should be doing this? It’s an idealistic phrase, not one that’s supposed to apply to every organization.
I rarely hear "technical debt" in the context of "let's incur some technical debt now so we can deliver this ticket quickly", it's rather "we can't deliver this ticket quickly now because somebody (usually somebody else) incurred technical debt" in the past.
If management is using it usually an attempt to shut discussion down in the context of (i) poor psychological safety on the part of devs because (ii) management doesn't trust anything the devs say because (iii) management knows that the devs are reading cargo-cult blog posts like "if this software was written in Haskell it wouldn't have any bugs".
Re: Technical Debt Is a Myth
#9"Taking out an organisational mortgage should be a deliberate choices. It has costs, interest, pros, and cons." I could not agree more.
It seems like they are trying to do otherwise but I see this article as perpetuating the basic problem with "technical debt" which is the analogy with debt. But what do you expect from an article on Medium? If you take on debt the bank is going to question if you can pay it. You're going to have to go through a formal process and bring in expensive experts such as accountants to justify that taking on debt is worthwh…
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Re: Technical Debt Is a Myth
#10> When we use the term technical debt, lots of non-technical people hear, ‘This is a technical problem, with technical solutions.’ This thinking couldn’t be further from the truth. If the organisation is responsible for the creation of the debt (as established above), it’s also responsible for the elimination of it. Debt belongs to the entire organisation.
This is a strawman.