Re:Undebt: How We Refactored 3M Lines of Code
by initram on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @01:15PM
(#12353561)
>To a product manager, even four weeks of technical debt reduction sounds like "no new features for a month."
Yeah, but if you can't implement new features in under a month because the code is such a mess, then maybe spending a month cleaning it up will allow you to do more features in a shorter amount of time, thus increasing revenue faster than just hacking more features into the existing crappy codebase. Obviously it depends on the codebase, but you have to look at both long and short term goals to make good decisions.
Yeah, but if you can't implement new features in under a month because the code is such a mess, then maybe spending a month cleaning it up will allow you to do more features in a shorter amount of time, thus increasing revenue faster than just hacking more features into the existing crappy codebase. Obviously it depends on the codebase, but you have to look at both long and short term goals to make good decisions.