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Sure, but you will find out that eng has more desire to rewrite than gradually increase quality. Meaning... When you choose your debt reduction strategy, you c

• barrkel 7y ago
  There's little point rewriting code which isn't modified often. And actually it's code which is modified often which accumulates design debt; structure tends to "dissolve" in the face of repeated local modifications by engineers on a time budget who don't understand the whole and don't know where to make the right changes. Ugly code which is locked away in a module isn't a big deal unless it's a performance problem or bug magnet. I wouldn't really consider that stuff debt, though; if it's not impeding velocity, you're not paying interest on it. Technical debt which has a noticeable interest payment, that's worth reducing. Sometimes the interest cost isn't obvious. E.g. the UI might be written using some framework which is 5 years old; it might be reasonably clean internally, but the payment comes from developer churn and lack of appeal to devs (whether current or pending hire) wanting to keep their CVs up to date. That cost is real, yet it's imposed exogenously, not because of any deficiencies in the actual technology.
  • tehlike 7y ago
    "wanting to keep their CVs up to date" This is part of my point. The eng could have spent 6 more months on making that UI even better, only to have another eng rewrite it in 5 years because... why not.