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to attempt to reword what you're saying: the worst kind of tech debt is the kind that grows over time (perhaps as people interact with the system and continue
by shoo 8y ago
to attempt to reword what you're saying:
the worst kind of tech debt is the kind that grows over time (perhaps as people interact with the system and continue to make changes to it)
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoI’m not sure if I would say that. Maybe we’re saying the same thing, but I would characterize it more by saying the worst tech debt is whatever is allowing new tech debt in code today. I think it’s specifically that the worst tech debt is whatever tech debt you are adding at the moment, whatever is changing in the code right now. It’s the leak vs. puddle analogy. Stopping the leak allows you to stop letting new tech debt get in, regardless of whether existing tech debt is a growing puddle. For example, when thinking about what tech debt to fix, a mistake I think people make is to focus on a big “systemic” piece of old tech debt that seems to grow because it affects new things and forces you to code around it or something. But the project has self-evidently been living with that tech debt already. It can be managed. In the meantime if some relatively harmless seeming tech debt continues to creep in through code reviews, that’s a worse problem, even if it’s not “growing over time” in the manner of a long-lived wart in the system.