4 ms·

A few reasons. If you're an employee building a product for a company, management's always going to push for features, features, features, to keep the customers

A few reasons. If you're an employee building a product for a company, management's always going to push for features, features, features, to keep the customers happy, and to keep up with the competition. Time spent refactoring is an investment in the future, but management tends to be more shortsighted than that. By the time that you really can't add more to the program, it's years down the line, and they've probably been considering pulling the plug anyhow. In my own projects, it's often fun to keep adding things until I hit a roadblock, then spend a couple weeks reworking stuff. It's satisfying to add new features, but architectural maintenance feels like treading water. So, I'd guess that the answer is somewhere between "outside factors dictate that there isn't time" and "we haven't decided to make the time, even though we could". There's an interview with the two main developers here, from 5 years ago: https://sourceforge.net/blog/potm-201301/ https://sourceforge.net/blog/potm-201301/ It sounds like they ran out of energy to really rearchitect the whole thing, or build a new one from scratch.

qwerty456127 9y ago
> If you're an employee building a product for a company, management's always going to push for features What company? What management? What customers? What features? Are we still talking about DOSBox?
- khedoros1 9y ago
  No; I was speaking more generally about some potential reasons that software wouldn't be kept in a low-debt state. The same concepts could apply to Dosbox with some remapping. What company? The Dosbox project itself. What management? The devs making overall decisions for the direction of the project. What customers? Anyone requesting new features and fixes in the software. What features? Built-in support for Munt, new networking support, support for more varieties of peripheral hardware... It made sense to me to give a more general explanation, since this thread started off with a question about what technical debt is in the first place. I also did my best to address Dosbox's specific reasons by posting the interview with their devs and providing my own interpretation of it.

qwerty456127 9y ago

> If you're an employee building a product for a company, management's always going to push for features What company? What management? What customers? What features? Are we still talking about DOSBox?

khedoros1 9y ago
No; I was speaking more generally about some potential reasons that software wouldn't be kept in a low-debt state. The same concepts could apply to Dosbox with some remapping. What company? The Dosbox project itself. What management? The devs making overall decisions for the direction of the project. What customers? Anyone requesting new features and fixes in the software. What features? Built-in support for Munt, new networking support, support for more varieties of peripheral hardware... It made sense to me to give a more general explanation, since this thread started off with a question about what technical debt is in the first place. I also did my best to address Dosbox's specific reasons by posting the interview with their devs and providing my own interpretation of it.