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If you were advising an airplane manufacturer where production was tracked by weight, you might admonish them that they were putting airplane parts on the wrong
by brlewis 3y ago
If you were advising an airplane manufacturer where production was tracked by weight, you might admonish them that they were putting airplane parts on the wrong side of the ledger. But later, after they changed their practices to stop encouraging the production of useless parts, the remaining airplane parts would be counted as assets, not liabilities. You, and they, would look back on the ledger comment as hyperbole.
- karmakaze 3y ago> the remaining airplane parts would be counted as assets I'm not in the industry so can't say, but the weight of parts is always a liability as it contributes to fuel consumption. Parts also require maintenance (but not necessarily by weight). An operational plane as a whole is certainly an asset. Perhaps this is how we should handle software, the whole is an asset, the quantity of parts that need maintenance are liabilities.
- brlewis 3y agoMost assets have costs associated with their ownership. So one might temporarily think about ownership in terms of liability as a reminder that those costs exist. However, you should then go back to using "asset" and "liability" in a way that people understand. Don't thank your collaborators for adding useful liabilities to your codebase.
- giantrobot 3y agoWhile those airplane parts might be assets, they're still deprecating and have maintenance liabilities. Existing code might be an asset but it has costs to run and maintain.