5 ms·

The development team at a company I worked for stated they had technical debt. They said they would spend the next year eradicating it. Then didn't even try. Y

The development team at a company I worked for stated they had technical debt. They said they would spend the next year eradicating it. Then didn't even try. You want to know what technical debt really is? The result of procrastination in the realm of tech. It's not even worth giving it a funny name like technical debt that upper management doesn't really get. They understand what procrastination is. You can't spin procrastination. It is what it is.

chatmasta 11y ago
Is someone who takes a financial loan procrastinating paying their bills? Or are they solving a short term problem the best way they know how? Procrastination may lead to technical debt, but it's not the only source. The biggest source of technical debt is insufficient planning for future product requirements, leading to old code blocking new features. That's why the concept is called "debt," because it's as if you took out a loan on the first iteration of the product, and then many features later, you're still paying interest on that loan. So no, technical debt is not purely the result of procrastination. Sure, procrastination, especially in the planning stage, can create technical debt. But even the most productive people, those mythical creatures who never procrastinate, are vulnerable to creating technical debt for themselves. In fact you might argue they're more likely to create technical debt, if they choose to skip the planning phase and jump right into coding.
- nlawalker 11y ago
  >> insufficient planning for future product requirements This covers both low prioritization and procrastination, the former of which I think is what you're getting at, and the latter of which I think is what purpled_haze is talking about. It's the difference between "we'd like to clean up this technical debt but these new features are too pressing" and "we have nothing else going on, we're going to clean up this technical debt..." and then never doing it. In my experience, the latter happens because no one ever generates a real execution plan to get it done, often because there's just no reward for doing so.
- bpchaps 11y ago
  I don't know if "debt" or "procrastination" are really the correct words. It seems to be somewhat in the middle of the two, where the problem comes from "We'll take care of that in the future." where the future never comes. A good example of that might be in log refactoring. I recently quit a place for what amounted to a complete lack of interest in correcting bad logs. After spending 8 hours trying to fix some non-prod issues and being completely halted by timeout errors, I was told "Those errors are fine, they even happen in prod (!!!). We talked about fixing it, but agreed to do it way further down the line." So, not really procrastination or technical debt, but something similar since it's 'debt' and 'procrastination' are simply symptoms of a larger problem.
crpatino 11y ago
Disagreed. Procrastination is letting for tomorrow what you know you should be doing today. Technical debt is what happens when you try to do today what is due for tomorrow but you know deep down it cannot be done properly in less than 3 days. Then you deliver and you pray that none will be looking close enough to notice the difference. What the article says is that technical debt is actually a good thing if whatever you are doing today has more than 50% chance of being thrown out of the window by the end of the month. If is better to try 20 crappy things, discard 15 and keep 5, than to do 8 good things and keep 1 or 2. But this is only true when people take next month to fix the 5 things that were found to work in the past "sprint". The reason we all hate technical debt is because virtually no one does that.

chatmasta 11y ago

Is someone who takes a financial loan procrastinating paying their bills? Or are they solving a short term problem the best way they know how? Procrastination may lead to technical debt, but it's not the only source. The biggest source of technical debt is insufficient planning for future product requirements, leading to old code blocking new features. That's why the concept is called "debt," because it's as if you took out a loan on the first iteration of the product, and then many features later, you're still paying interest on that loan. So no, technical debt is not purely the result of procrastination. Sure, procrastination, especially in the planning stage, can create technical debt. But even the most productive people, those mythical creatures who never procrastinate, are vulnerable to creating technical debt for themselves. In fact you might argue they're more likely to create technical debt, if they choose to skip the planning phase and jump right into coding.

nlawalker 11y ago
>> insufficient planning for future product requirements This covers both low prioritization and procrastination, the former of which I think is what you're getting at, and the latter of which I think is what purpled_haze is talking about. It's the difference between "we'd like to clean up this technical debt but these new features are too pressing" and "we have nothing else going on, we're going to clean up this technical debt..." and then never doing it. In my experience, the latter happens because no one ever generates a real execution plan to get it done, often because there's just no reward for doing so.
bpchaps 11y ago
I don't know if "debt" or "procrastination" are really the correct words. It seems to be somewhat in the middle of the two, where the problem comes from "We'll take care of that in the future." where the future never comes. A good example of that might be in log refactoring. I recently quit a place for what amounted to a complete lack of interest in correcting bad logs. After spending 8 hours trying to fix some non-prod issues and being completely halted by timeout errors, I was told "Those errors are fine, they even happen in prod (!!!). We talked about fixing it, but agreed to do it way further down the line." So, not really procrastination or technical debt, but something similar since it's 'debt' and 'procrastination' are simply symptoms of a larger problem.

crpatino 11y ago

Disagreed. Procrastination is letting for tomorrow what you know you should be doing today. Technical debt is what happens when you try to do today what is due for tomorrow but you know deep down it cannot be done properly in less than 3 days. Then you deliver and you pray that none will be looking close enough to notice the difference. What the article says is that technical debt is actually a good thing if whatever you are doing today has more than 50% chance of being thrown out of the window by the end of the month. If is better to try 20 crappy things, discard 15 and keep 5, than to do 8 good things and keep 1 or 2. But this is only true when people take next month to fix the 5 things that were found to work in the past "sprint". The reason we all hate technical debt is because virtually no one does that.