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This kind of "debt" is seldom "technical". It is a symptom of all manner of factors. In software organisations the symptoms of trouble become visible in codebas

This kind of "debt" is seldom "technical". It is a symptom of all manner of factors. In software organisations the symptoms of trouble become visible in codebases and/or behaviour of systems. Thinking about the artifacts as the problem area tends to cause fixing of symptoms and fringe causes, not systemic causes. As far as I've experienced, this sort of "narrow solving due to narrow framing" is endemic in software. It takes a lot of culture building for things like Gemba walk to work in practice, i.e. sure, root about for bad smells because that's how you discover something's fishy, but then work at a systems level to root out the systemic causes and malincentives. edit: use better words

still_grokking 4y ago
Never heard the term Gemba walk before. So I've looked it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemba Gemba means "the actual place" (where value is created). The core idea behind the Gemba walk is a follows: > Gemba (aka Walkie Lookie) walks denote the action of going to see the actual process, understand the work, ask questions, and learn. It is also known as one fundamental part of Lean management philosophy. > Taiichi Ohno, an executive at Toyota, led the development of the concept of the Gemba Walk. The Gemba Walk is an opportunity for staff to stand back from their day-to-day tasks to walk the floor of their workplace to identify wasteful activities. The objective of Gemba Walk is to understand the value stream and its problems rather than review results or make superficial comments.