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I mostly agree with you. Perhaps another distinction Uncle Bob could have made is between hidden technical debt (i.e. the mess that PHBs refuse to acknowledge)
by mellery451 15y ago
I mostly agree with you.
Perhaps another distinction Uncle Bob could have made is between hidden technical debt (i.e. the mess that PHBs refuse to acknowledge) and acknowledged technical debt. Uncle Bob is talking about the latter, where everyone agrees some trade-offs were made up-front.
The former is much harder to wrangle because, so often, the decision makers are unwilling to accept that it even exists ("well, the system's working fine, isn't it!?")
- jleader 15y ago"well, the system's working fine, isn't it!?" is analogous to "I haven't hit the limit on my credit card yet".
- wccrawford 15y agoEven worse, there isn't a hard limit on technical debt. You can't plan for it. When you do hit the limit, you're up against the wall.
- famousactress 15y agoAgain, the analogy is crazy good. You're just ignoring the interest payments. If you're actually not feeling any pain then it's quite likely that you haven't taken on what I'd call technical debt (or that you've taken on some sort of deferred debt, similar to 0%-interest-for-1-year style furniture purchases). The interest payments are analogous to friction that you ought to be feeling day to day when you're carrying around technical debt. New features are more expensive to build, more bugs are popping up in these areas that are slowing the team's progress, etc.