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Amen. And debt is a really un-useful term for this, too, IMHO. More often than not, when you're down the line and dealing with the concequences of prior shortc
by midenginedcoupe 4y ago
Amen.
And debt is a really un-useful term for this, too, IMHO. More often than not, when you're down the line and dealing with the concequences of prior shortcuts the optimal solution you can think of now is different to the one you considered at the time of the original decision. And it also completely ignores the concept of great, perhaps also expensive, decisions taken in the past that are now no longer such a good fit. They weren't knowingly done as a debt, but the world changed.
The word "debt" has too much associated meaning. People understand the term too well. Instead I'd like people to just talk about "change" instead. Value judgements about the reasons we got here don't add anything useful to the decision on the tradeoff as to whether the suggested change is worth doing.
- jen20 4y agoI’ve always explained “technical debt” to program managers in the finance industry as behaving more like an unhedged call contract than debt.
- s3tz 4y agoWhat engineers mean by debt toughly falls into two buckets. The first is actual debt, coding done on borrowed time, either consciously or unconsciously. The second is when a lack of experience, knowledge, laziness or other bad habits cause the code written to not be adaptable/agile enough to later have a low cost of change when the world changes. Many reasons and excuses for each, but the first one is usually due to business reasons (why polish and mature one feature when you can develop five) while the second is due to engineering reasons.
- midenginedcoupe 4y agoSee the comment I was replying to. Mostly it means "I want to do x and I can't think of a better justification".