You, your future self, technology debt and corporate interest

You and your future self 

There in an epic battle going in in our minds: the battle between the person we are now and the person we want to be. You would like to be successful, healthy, honest, be a good parent... but just now we want to have a lazy day, just another beer, a night out, buy some flashy gadget from our well earned money...

 

 

Technology debt

Technology debt is similar. We make shortcuts just to be able to keep the deadline or for simple laziness.  The latter usually happens in the early phase while the first in the late phase of the project. Technology debt starts with week requirements, overly optimistic deadlines, non adequate technology design and goes to clumsy user interfaces, weak algorithms, coding shortcuts, superficial testing and unfixed errors.   

 

Corporate interest

Business doesn't seem to have much feeling for technology debt. They simple want to get that product on the market and don't care about the future difficulties of IT. On the other hand it's also hard for them to understand  if the  IT works on old issues which don't have to do anything with projects at hand. And for long term they can say that on long term we all will be dead.

Payback

Debt must be paid back and that is also true for technology debt. And as debt is not evil by definition neither is technology debt.  The problem is that while financial debt is a straightforward, well understood concept, with technology debt we don't even know the interest rate. When and how will we have to fix the thing we neglected yesterday? If the project will be abandoned anyway we got the credit as a present and the same if we will have another job before payback. However it's worth to take care for your reputation otherwise you my build up a personal (or personality) debt...

 

Know your debt!

Programmers tend to handle technology debt as a dirty secret. That's quite wrong. Our debtors (the business, project sponsor, customer) have the right to know that they are just getting debt, what they save and how big the payback will be. And you have to manage it.

Technology debt should be managed like a budget deficit; it shouldn't go above a certain level and it should have a right structure (= a good income /payback ratio). And internal debt (i.e. within your company) is usually easier to manage than debt to your customer, or with other words an activity should bring value to the customer otherwise it's superfluous.  So make stock of your debt and manage it (e.g. go through the issues in your error database and fix them).