3 ms·
A mess is debt, because you have to pay interest on it. If you don't pay your interest, it will compound and completely kill your velocity. Nothing in Ward's tr
by feoren 4y ago
A mess is debt, because you have to pay interest on it. If you don't pay your interest, it will compound and completely kill your velocity. Nothing in Ward's transcript disputes that, nor would it matter if he did (Death of the Author).
Ward seems to be clarifying the difference between useful technical debt, which gets your product out the door faster, and wasteful technical debt, which is writing your code poorly when you could have done better.
If it's slowing your velocity down, making things harder than they should be, it's technical debt. I suppose if you had a "mess" that was self-contained, bug-free, and not slowing you down at all, then that's not debt -- but is it even a mess?
- maerF0x0 4y agoyou've described a mess correctly, but misused the term/jargon. What you've described is poor quality implementation. There are many (infinite?) implementations that could satisfy the product manager, but each has it's nuances of correctness in non-tested cases (if you have tests), in runtime effects, race conditions (across processes), thread safety, ease of refactor, readability etc. All these are markers of software quality, but failing to do them is not "techdebt". Tech debt is a very specific thing as described in the video above