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Absolutely! One of the reasons I wrote this post was experiences gained working in a team that had in effect become insolvent (in the tech debt sense). In the

Absolutely! One of the reasons I wrote this post was experiences gained working in a team that had in effect become insolvent (in the tech debt sense). In the end we went for a combination of large re-writes (which we didn't feel good about, heeding Joel Spolskys advice) and Strangulation Architecture.

brudgers 11y ago
This is all second hand from listening to Spolsky's podcasts. Spolsky's advice regarding rewrites highlights perhaps different kinds of technical debt. The code for Fogbugz was well written VBscript and the motivation for Wasabi was expanding the market for Fogbugz to Linux...I believe this produced an incremental increase of about 10% of sales. Wasabi was a tool that supported the product and where the technical debt accrued. We might call the issue with Fogbugz "platform debt" and at the time Fogbugz was written, few people would have anticipated the growth of Linux...and based on Spolsky's description of sales, focusing on Windows was a sound platform choice -- in 2000 Fogbugz would have been unlikely to have succeeded in its market as a web based product.