![]() I once worked on a team that complained ad infinitum that customer information required a query that drew from two different tables. This constraint explains the loathsome characteristics of this code, and it also prevents us from doing our own genius solution. It allows us to assume that the prior developers just sucked at their jobs-which is uncharitable, but fine, until we realize that there was actually a constraint we didn’t know about. ![]() And we can find that terminology by dissecting what we mean when we say “tech debt.” Tech debt is more than just bad codeĮquating tech debt to bad code allows us to fall into traps. We, the engineers, have to examine our terminology. When businesspeople don’t want to grant a “tech debt week” because they saw with their own eyeballs that the last one improved the team’s capacity zero percent, how can we expect them to grant us another one with alacrity? They remember the last time they granted those weeks: within a month the team was underwater again. It sounds to the business like the engineers are asking for three weeks free from the obligation to release any features. Each conversant assumes they know what we’re all talking about, but their individual pictures differ quite a bit. Here’s the effect: the minute we trot out the term “tech debt,” everyone is upset but no one is listening. Engineers? Their answers vary the most, but often they’ve got something to say about “bad code.” We’ll return to why “tech debt equals bad code” is such a scourge, but first we have to address the effect of a bunch of different people defining the same term differently in the first place. Product folks lament how it means they lose three weeks and get no features out of the deal. Designers say it means the design can’t look the way they planned it. So they slap the term onto whatever happens to bother or frighten them. How many different answers do you get? Three? Four? Seven?Įverybody associates the term with a feeling-frustration, usually-but they don’t have a precise idea of where that feeling comes from. ![]() How? We try to get businesspeople, designers, product managers, and engineers onto the same page by using the phrase “tech debt.” But that phrase puts us on completely different pages.Īsk someone in tech if they’ve heard of tech debt, and they’re likely to respond with a knowing sigh. We have no idea how to even get the business to consider that.ĭoes this sound familiar? It’s a disheartening conversation.īut we often predispose ourselves to this situation. ![]() Every feature release will feel like this until we get a few weeks to dig ourselves out of tech debt. A third needed to spelunk a long-abandoned repository to initiate the database changes. Another got stuck reorganizing the feature flags. One developer got caught in a framework update. We were supposed to release this feature three weeks ago. ![]()
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