Its time to call Bullshit on "Technical Debt"

-
Seriously.
You know what "Technical Debt" is, right?
Ok, heres the (official?) Wikipedia definition
 Technical debt (also known as design debt or code debt) is a neologistic metaphor referring to the eventual consequences of poor or evolving software architecture and software development within a codebase. The debt can be thought of as work that needs to be done before a particular job can be considered complete. As a change is started on a codebase, there is often the need to make other coordinated changes at the same time in other parts of the codebase or documentation. The other required, but uncompleted changes, are considered debt that must be paid at some point in the future.
And in this - somewhat purist - sense, "Technical Debt" is absolutely valid.
The problem arises in the way it is almost invariably used, viz., as an excuse to not do something.
Herewith a simple exercise - the next time you hear someone cite "Technical Debt" as a reason to not do something, use the following three-part test
  1. Replace "Technical Debt" with "Chewbacca".  
  2. Check to see if  the information content of the explanation has changed.
  3. If it hasn't changed, the explanation is bullshit.
  4. Heck, if it has increased, the explanation is clearly bullshit!
Now, think back of all the times someone in your organization has done this
  • We can't implement the new sorting algorithm because we're still dealing with Chewbacca
  • We're going to have to wait on the GUI because of Chewbacca
  • We'll update the fetzer valve as soon as we've dealt with Chewbacca
 See? Makes just about as much sense now as before, doesn't it?

Oh, as a bonus, swapping in Chewbacca sounds funnier - at least you'll have that...

Comments

Anonymous said…
I see what you did there! Anyone who defends the concept labels herself as among the do-nothing party!

If TD looks like a phantom from where you sit, you must be sitting pretty!
November 11, 2012 at 10:22 AM
dieswaytoofast said…
Heh.
I'm not denying that it exists - just pointing out that in the vast majority of cases, it really is bullshit, and is - absolutely - an excuse to do nothing :-)
November 11, 2012 at 10:34 AM
J said…
Technical debt is just a marketing bullshit invented by agile pros when their books' sale fell. It might be good for language dicksize wars (as in "java incurs more TD than lisp!!1!"), but since it's not only impossible to measure, but even to conclusively define (eg. singletons today would be mostly considered TD, but not so 15 years ago), it's essentially worthless as a notion. A blogpost metaphor, nothing more.

The problem of course exists, as does bad code, but it's no way to deal with it, just to sell consulting services. :-)
December 30, 2012 at 3:23 PM
Anonymous said…
Employee design debt in customer support refers to the accumulation of problems or inefficiencies in the way that customer support is structured or carried out that can lead to increased difficulty or burden for employees.
July 18, 2023 at 6:48 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Erlang, Binaries, and Garbage Collection (Sigh)

-
Image
The nice thing about garbage-collection is that it is makes memory management absolutely transparent to you Of course, the above is true right up to the point when it stops being transparent, at which point it does a phase change from nice to clusterf**k of biblical proportions .  There are entire posts, books, and suicide notes that have been written about this, and I have no great desire to add to them, save with the minor comment that paranoia about garbage-collection is still justified , albeit only in the edge-cases for most people. That said, I'll give you that Erlang GC is in many ways much, much better positioned in this regard than, oh, Java, but it still rears up and bites you in the butt when you least expect it. ( More information about Erlang's GC vis-a-vis Java here , and Jesper's truly excellent description of Erlang's GC here ).  A story from the past should serve to illustrate this. Once upon a time, in a magical land far far away - well, Her
Read more

Visualizing Prime Numbers

-
Image
From Jason Davies , we have El Patron de Los Primos , probably one of the coolest prime number visualizer that I've seen.  For every Natural number, he draws a periodic curve that intersects at that number and each of its multiples.  Needless to say, prime numbers are touched by only two curves (itself and 1 ). You can scroll to the right, and move up the prime food change. (The image above is a screen grab.  Go here to see the actual thing)
Read more