3 ms·

but it presents problems months down the line when a new feature needs to be added or an existing one changed in a non-trivial way. I think I have yet to see a

by Udik 10y ago

but it presents problems months down the line when a new feature needs to be added or an existing one changed in a non-trivial way. I think I have yet to see any software to which this doesn't apply sooner or later. While the whole point of "technical debt" is that it is something you're supposed to knowingly acquire because of time constraints. You're basically saying "we knew it was wrong, but they forced us to do it that way". While to me, most of the times, the truth is that you really didn't know. Yes, you coded in a hurry, but there is always a time constraint of some kind so that's no excuse. Somebody else in the same time would have done a better job. As for my points: if I realize I didn't know what I was doing, I always refactor the code. Committing code that you know to be conceptually wrong is just sloppy. And if I am under pressure by the management is because I spent time developing without understanding what I was doing; a better developer would have gotten it right at the first try, and there would be no technical debt. If the managers/ product owners didn't produce clear requirements, it's not a technical debt, it's a sloppy job on their part. If the planning was wrong, that's a sloppy job on the part of who had to do it. Responsibilities should be found and action should be taken. Saying "ah yes you know, we were under pressure so we (kind of naturally) accumulated this technical debt" is just a way to save everybody's face.

nilkn 10y ago
> And if I am under pressure by the management is because I spent time developing without understanding what I was doing; a better developer would have gotten it right at the first try, and there would be no technical debt. While this reasoning is probably not technically wrong, I'm not sure if it's relevant to the real world. You can always make an argument of form "there exists a developer who could have got this feature right on the first try, with very little time spent." This simply does not matter when you do not happen to have that developer on your team right at the moment. The nature of the work is that you will work on a variety of things, and you won't necessarily be the best in the world at every individual thing. You're inevitably going to encounter work that's challenging enough for you where you don't get it perfectly right on your first try. > If the managers/ product owners didn't produce clear requirements, it's not a technical debt, it's a sloppy job on their part. It's a sloppy job on their part, induced by time pressure, which produces technical debt. I feel like you're just playing with definitions here to avoid admitting that technical debt can come from poorly managed time pressure. > if I realize I didn't know what I was doing, I always refactor the code. All that tells me is that you've never been under a lot of time pressure. That's not a bad thing. It most likely means the management at your companies have been competent. But it doesn't mean that technical debt does not exist or cannot be induced from time pressure in other companies.
- Udik 10y ago
  I guess that what I'm trying to say - and that got clearer to me while replying to other comments in this thread- is that it feels we're using the term "technical debt" as a way to avoid talking about personal skills or lack thereof, and to avoid admitting our or other people's faults. If I say that we need one more week of work on something because of technical debt due to the exceptional circumstances is one thing; if I say that it is because one of my colleagues didn't do his or her job properly, it's different. Remember that the business might have no clue of how long or difficult some tasks are and judge them only by the amount of work required. So a series of bad design decisions and consequent technical debt can give the impression of a very hard task on which everybody is working skillfully, while in fact it's an easy task with somebody that doesn't know how to do his job. As for your other points: maybe one of my team members produces consistently more technical debt than the others. Is it still technical debt? Manager or designers can be the source of time pressure for those down in the chain, because bad planning or decisions, made in absence of time pressure, can force others to work under pressure. Again, "technical debt" masks the real problem. I might not have worked in extremely high pressure environments - but I've surely worked in teams where we were leaving the office at ten or eleven pm every night for months on end just because demented design decisions had been made by the much respected solution architect.
  - crdoconnor 10y ago
    >As for your other points: maybe one of my team members produces consistently more technical debt than the others. Is it still technical debt? ??? Why wouldn't it be? Creating lots of extra technical debt, in fact, is a defining feature of poorer developers.
    - Udik 10y ago
      >>I often have the impression that the term "technical debt" is just an euphemism to avoid admitting that someone in the team has produced poorly thought and poorly written code >Creating lots of extra technical debt, in fact, is a defining feature of poorer developers. I think we agree then. It's just that "technical debt" makes it sound- to me at least- inevitable and impersonal, while it is possible (at least for substantial amounts of it) to ascribe it to specific people and to avoid it by hiring better people.
crdoconnor 10y ago
>And if I am under pressure by the management is because I spent time developing without understanding what I was doing; a better developer would have gotten it right at the first try, and there would be no technical debt. This is possibly the most wrongheaded comment you've made. 1) There is no such thing as "no technical debt". It asymptotically trends to zero but never, ever gets there. If you think that you oe anybody else is the kind of developer who magically creates debt-free code all the time then you're deluded. 2) The "right first try" argument is wrong. You shouldn't even try to get it right first try - that's the whole point of red/green/refactor. You're supposed to get it working and then clean it up because prematurely 'cleaning up code' is an inefficient way to work. It's not called red/green/refactor-if-you're-too-shit-to-get-it-right-first-try.
- Udik 10y ago
  Ok for your first point - although I'd argue that technical debt is something that usually asks to be repayed within months. A two year old technical debt is just an improvable software - that is, it didn't yet show problems serious enough as to call for a refactor at unchanged requirements. As for your second point, what should I do? Try to get it wrong? To get it working how? We're not talking of premature optimization here, we're talking about understanding the requirements, understanding the tools, understanding the big picture, understanding your time constraints, and pulling out the best job you can.
  - andrewingram 10y ago
    Simplest kind of technical debt: 1. I use a particular technique/abstraction/whatever to solve the problem, it solves the problem well. 2. Over time we solve other problems elsewhere. As we go, the bigger picture becomes clearer and we pick more suitable techniques/abstractions/whatevers as we go. 3. Eventually we have to solve a problem that interacts with the original problem, the newer techniques/abstractions/whatevers don't work cleanly with the new ones. So we have to make a choice: a) Hack something together that solves the current problem without us having to touch much of the older code. b) Rewrite the old code to match the newer technique/abstractions/whatevers. c) Put down tools and thoroughly evaluate whether there's an even better technique/abstraction/whatever that solves the old problems and the new ones. We all know that C would give us the best code, but it's also likely to mean we never get anything done because every new problem means reevaluating everything. B happens more often, but in reality we usually end up doing A due to various pressures. At no point has bad code been written, but there's technical debt nonetheless. Over time we become better at adopting patterns an architectures that allow for clearly defined boundaries and reduced cost of making mistakes, you still get technical debt (because just about anything you want to change can be considered technical debt), but it doesn't tend to cripple your ability to get things done.

by Udik 10y ago

nilkn 10y ago

> And if I am under pressure by the management is because I spent time developing without understanding what I was doing; a better developer would have gotten it right at the first try, and there would be no technical debt. While this reasoning is probably not technically wrong, I'm not sure if it's relevant to the real world. You can always make an argument of form "there exists a developer who could have got this feature right on the first try, with very little time spent." This simply does not matter when you do not happen to have that developer on your team right at the moment. The nature of the work is that you will work on a variety of things, and you won't necessarily be the best in the world at every individual thing. You're inevitably going to encounter work that's challenging enough for you where you don't get it perfectly right on your first try. > If the managers/ product owners didn't produce clear requirements, it's not a technical debt, it's a sloppy job on their part. It's a sloppy job on their part, induced by time pressure, which produces technical debt. I feel like you're just playing with definitions here to avoid admitting that technical debt can come from poorly managed time pressure. > if I realize I didn't know what I was doing, I always refactor the code. All that tells me is that you've never been under a lot of time pressure. That's not a bad thing. It most likely means the management at your companies have been competent. But it doesn't mean that technical debt does not exist or cannot be induced from time pressure in other companies.

Udik 10y ago
I guess that what I'm trying to say - and that got clearer to me while replying to other comments in this thread- is that it feels we're using the term "technical debt" as a way to avoid talking about personal skills or lack thereof, and to avoid admitting our or other people's faults. If I say that we need one more week of work on something because of technical debt due to the exceptional circumstances is one thing; if I say that it is because one of my colleagues didn't do his or her job properly, it's different. Remember that the business might have no clue of how long or difficult some tasks are and judge them only by the amount of work required. So a series of bad design decisions and consequent technical debt can give the impression of a very hard task on which everybody is working skillfully, while in fact it's an easy task with somebody that doesn't know how to do his job. As for your other points: maybe one of my team members produces consistently more technical debt than the others. Is it still technical debt? Manager or designers can be the source of time pressure for those down in the chain, because bad planning or decisions, made in absence of time pressure, can force others to work under pressure. Again, "technical debt" masks the real problem. I might not have worked in extremely high pressure environments - but I've surely worked in teams where we were leaving the office at ten or eleven pm every night for months on end just because demented design decisions had been made by the much respected solution architect.
- crdoconnor 10y ago
  >As for your other points: maybe one of my team members produces consistently more technical debt than the others. Is it still technical debt? ??? Why wouldn't it be? Creating lots of extra technical debt, in fact, is a defining feature of poorer developers.
  - Udik 10y ago
    >>I often have the impression that the term "technical debt" is just an euphemism to avoid admitting that someone in the team has produced poorly thought and poorly written code >Creating lots of extra technical debt, in fact, is a defining feature of poorer developers. I think we agree then. It's just that "technical debt" makes it sound- to me at least- inevitable and impersonal, while it is possible (at least for substantial amounts of it) to ascribe it to specific people and to avoid it by hiring better people.

crdoconnor 10y ago

>And if I am under pressure by the management is because I spent time developing without understanding what I was doing; a better developer would have gotten it right at the first try, and there would be no technical debt. This is possibly the most wrongheaded comment you've made. 1) There is no such thing as "no technical debt". It asymptotically trends to zero but never, ever gets there. If you think that you oe anybody else is the kind of developer who magically creates debt-free code all the time then you're deluded. 2) The "right first try" argument is wrong. You shouldn't even try to get it right first try - that's the whole point of red/green/refactor. You're supposed to get it working and then clean it up because prematurely 'cleaning up code' is an inefficient way to work. It's not called red/green/refactor-if-you're-too-shit-to-get-it-right-first-try.

Udik 10y ago
Ok for your first point - although I'd argue that technical debt is something that usually asks to be repayed within months. A two year old technical debt is just an improvable software - that is, it didn't yet show problems serious enough as to call for a refactor at unchanged requirements. As for your second point, what should I do? Try to get it wrong? To get it working how? We're not talking of premature optimization here, we're talking about understanding the requirements, understanding the tools, understanding the big picture, understanding your time constraints, and pulling out the best job you can.
- andrewingram 10y ago
  Simplest kind of technical debt: 1. I use a particular technique/abstraction/whatever to solve the problem, it solves the problem well. 2. Over time we solve other problems elsewhere. As we go, the bigger picture becomes clearer and we pick more suitable techniques/abstractions/whatevers as we go. 3. Eventually we have to solve a problem that interacts with the original problem, the newer techniques/abstractions/whatevers don't work cleanly with the new ones. So we have to make a choice: a) Hack something together that solves the current problem without us having to touch much of the older code. b) Rewrite the old code to match the newer technique/abstractions/whatevers. c) Put down tools and thoroughly evaluate whether there's an even better technique/abstraction/whatever that solves the old problems and the new ones. We all know that C would give us the best code, but it's also likely to mean we never get anything done because every new problem means reevaluating everything. B happens more often, but in reality we usually end up doing A due to various pressures. At no point has bad code been written, but there's technical debt nonetheless. Over time we become better at adopting patterns an architectures that allow for clearly defined boundaries and reduced cost of making mistakes, you still get technical debt (because just about anything you want to change can be considered technical debt), but it doesn't tend to cripple your ability to get things done.