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A big part of technical debt is that often... you just don't have to pay. This is what makes the comparison to financial debt a very poor one. Whenever I'm mov
by tziki 7y ago
A big part of technical debt is that often... you just don't have to pay. This is what makes the comparison to financial debt a very poor one.
Whenever I'm moving from one framework to another I find loads of todos I can now delete. Or even if I have a well designed class, if I can find a nice third party library that does the exact same thing, I can now get rid of all that useless code and any debt around it.
Honestly I think calling it technical 'debt' makes programmers unreasonably averse to it, but unfortunately I haven't been able to come up with a better term.
- mobjack 7y agoTech debt is mainly a problem with code that needs frequent updates as it makes changes harder. If you have messy code that doesn't need updating, then it doesn't cost a thing to leave it in a bad state. The act of refactoring in these cases is a waste of effort and often does more harm than good by introducing bugs. I take the YAGNI when it comes to refactoring. Just pay back the stuff if the code actually slows you down in the future instead of doing it in advance. There is a lot of tech debt you can get away with for free without ever having to pay back.
- saagarjha 7y agoSo you're declaring tech bankruptcy.