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I look at tech debt as a tax on future productivity. If you see it that way, then it's obvious that 1) it's good to take it on on the short term in order to del
by alangibson 5y ago
I look at tech debt as a tax on future productivity. If you see it that way, then it's obvious that 1) it's good to take it on on the short term in order to deliver 2) your productivity asymptotically approaches zero if you don't pay it back.
- OJFord 5y ago1 is maybe true of real world tax at a stretch ('good not to worry about tax havens and optimal corporate structure early on'?) but I don't understand the analogy for 2?
- alangibson 5y agoI wasnt making an economic argument. Maybe 'drag on future work' would be a better way to put it. You could think of it as adding mass too.
- OJFord 5y agoOh sorry, I thought it was an analogy to income or some other 'real world' tax. So then I think you're saying if you don't fix it, and some percentage of everything you do adds more of it, eventually in the limit you're doing nothing more than some fixed point of progress? 'Take half the previous step forward' sort of thing.
- alangibson 5y agoThat's pretty much it. Tech debt makes it progressively harder to change a system. As it accumulates, making a change approaches 'impossible' while the work required to do it approaches 'infinite'. Throwing one more metaphor at it: If you don't scrub the barnacles off a ship, the ship will progressively become more difficult to steer. In fact it will eventually make sense to simply scrap the ship altogether. In software we call it a 'legacy application'.