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Bad product design = conceptual debt. It's a nice way to be able to say the costs you incur from making bad design choices early on, that now need to be dealt w
by nicoslepicos 11y ago
Bad product design = conceptual debt. It's a nice way to be able to say the costs you incur from making bad design choices early on, that now need to be dealt with and can be fixed.
But the concepts are not only in the product design, but also reflected in the software system architecture, since that will reflect the design.
One weird thing that happens is that developers insist that there is some sort of technical constraint, and then the product design reflects the software system architecture, rather than the software system architecture reflecting a product design well suited to users' mental models.
- collyw 11y agoThe debt part implies that it can be paid down, which can be applied to technical debt. Concepts will tend to stick (they are often at the very core of the application), so I am more inclined to agree that "bad design" is more appropriate than "conceptual debt".
- cerrelio 11y agoI'm dealing with this at work in an odd way. The users of the product are machines, as it is a predictive inference system. Humans will never directly interact with the product. So if you think about it, the input data is the user in my group's case. Due to the failure in recognizing this twist the decision was made to have a very restricted way of representing features (metadata). The concepts in code base are all linked by the restrictions. There have been a few painful refactorings in the past year, and I don't see an end to it unless those restrictions are removed. So this phrase extends well to systems without human users. Although like others I do agree that "bad product design" is probably a better term, but "conceptual debt" sounds more sophisticated.