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I 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.
by alangibson 5y ago
I 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'.