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They're painful because nobody is willing to argue the "business justification" for cleaning up tech debt, so your management asks you to hack away at the next
by nosefurhairdo 3y ago
They're painful because nobody is willing to argue the "business justification" for cleaning up tech debt, so your management asks you to hack away at the next feature instead. We've inherited a mess that slows us down in ways we can't produce metrics for, so we can't explain with pretty graphs how much more effective we would be if we cleaned up our config and tooling.
- Uehreka 3y agoAt a previous job where I had to deal with this stuff, I was able to make the case for an “update task” every six or twelve months, where we’d update all of the dependencies, change the config files that needed to be changed, etc. This would require a full-regression test, but this employer was in the business of doing these fairly frequently since they were super risk averse, and so adding another full regression test that only happened every six months or so was no big deal. We’d update a ton of stuff, inevitably break some obscure feature when used in IE11 (which at the time, they still supported), so we’d add a polyfill or chuck a dependency through babel and problem solved. Then nothing for 6–12 more months. This was annoying, but not nearly as annoying as taking inventory at a grocery store or dealing with bad customers at a restaurant. It’s just work, and we were paid to do it.