Object Mentor Blog: A Mess is not a Technical Debt.

A Mess is not a Technical Debt.

Uncle Bob — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 08:15:19 -0500

The term Technical Debt was created by Ward Cunningham to describe the engineering trade-off’s that software developers and business stakeholders must often make in order to meet schedules and customer expectations. In short, you may need to use suboptimal designs in the short term, because the schedule does not allow longer term designs to be used. As a simple example, your initial website design may need to be frames based because you don’t have time to build an Ajax framework.

Clearly this causes a debt. If the customer is looking for a web 2.0 system, then frames just aren’t going to cut it for long. So time is going to have to be carved out of a future schedule to refit the system with an Ajax solution.

In short, the business has decided that it can afford to delay release 2 in order to accelerate release 1. Is this wise?

Businesses make this kind of trade-off all the time; and there’s nothing inherently unwise about it. If the early release of 1.0 drives the business that pays for the development of 2.0 then the business has won. So this kind of reasoned technical debt may indeed be appropriate.

Unfortunately there is another situation that is sometimes called “technical debt” but that is neither reasoned nor wise. A mess.

Technical debt may be necessary, but it had also better be clean! If you are going to implement a frames solution instead of an AJAX solution, then make sure that the workmanship of the frames solution is top-notch. Make sure the design is well balanced, and the code is clean. If you make a mess while implementing that frames solution, you’ll never be able to replace it with an AJAX framework. The mess will impede your progress forever.

A mess is not a technical debt. A mess is just a mess. Technical debt decisions are made based on real project constraints. They are risky, but they can be beneficial. The decision to make a mess is never rational, is always based on laziness and unprofessionalism, and has no chance of paying of in the future. A mess is always a loss.

When you buy a house and take on a big mortgage debt, you tighten up all your spending and accounting. You clean up your books and your budgets. You behave with increased discipline. The same is true of technical debt. The more technical debt you take on, the tighter your disciplines need to be. You should do more testing, and more pairing and more refactoring. Technical debt is not a license to make a mess. Technical debt creates the need for even greater cleanliness.

When you decide to take on a technical debt, you had better make sure that your code stays squeaky clean. Keeping the system clean is the only way you will pay down that debt.

"A Mess is not a Technical Debt." by Anos 80

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:20:35 -0600

I don’t think technical debt is bad. just learning how to manage debt. Thanks from Anos 80

"A Mess is not a Technical Debt." by O que faz

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:18:18 -0600

Technical debt is bad. I advise anyone. To clean up the mess afterwards is harder. Cheers from O que faz

"A Mess is not a Technical Debt." by soft

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 21:35:04 -0600

good

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"A Mess is not a Technical Debt." by crack

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 04:05:35 -0600

echnical debt, sometimes we can define this as not really an obvious debt. For instance, no legal basis or you’ve just borrowed from your neighbor. )))))))

"A Mess is not a Technical Debt." by the energy egg

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 22:23:03 -0600

Technical debt, sometimes we can define this as not really an obvious debt. For instance, no legal basis or you’ve just borrowed from your neighbor. Things like that but technically it is debt.

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"A Mess is not a Technical Debt." by sid1138@gmail.com

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 10:13:12 -0600

Messy projects are a debt with a high interest rate. They are very similar to the debt caused by excessive use of a credit card, and the metaphor still works well.

You can be quick and dirty (i.e. messy) with your project to try out something. If you then go back IMMEDIATELY and clean everything up, the mess is not a problem. This is like using your credit card to buy stuff, but paying off your balance at the end of the month.

On the other hand, if you make a mess and then move on, the mess grows and gets out of control. This is just like buying lots of stuff on the credit card and then just making the minimum payments. Soon, that 20% interest will take all of your payment and you will never pay down that credit card debt.

Messy, reckless projects will accumulate “debt”, until the entire engineering budget and effort for that project is spent just trying to pay the interest (that is, just trying to keep the thing working). Like a huge credit card balance, the only way to solve that debt problem is a huge amount of austerity – no new features until the code is put into proper order.

There remains a major problem with both huge credit card debt and huge messy project debt. It takes a large measure of discipline to solve either problem and both the individual and the company have not shown that discipline in the past, so what makes you believe either can be discipline in the future.

I have seen many companies and projects die because they have never learned that discipline.

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Sat, 24 Dec 2011 01:15:24 -0600

Oh nice comment. Overall agree that accruing debt should lead to more discipline, not less. However, I think debt is abused in both technical and financial manners…...............

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"A Mess is not a Technical Debt." by Online Backup Review

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 06:18:46 -0600

Accidentally? No…but it’s still possible to inherit technical debt. It’s never a fun situation when you drop into a job and there’s already this huge mess to deal with (especially if you’re the one tasked with cleaning it up).

It’s sad that deadlines are such a deciding factor in so much of the software development done these days, but there are things you can do to help minimize the effects of them like making code easily extensible and working with modules and fight the urge to hard-code.

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