Keeping track of technical debt in source code

Re:Keeping track of technical debt in source code by krona on Friday April 14, 2017 @07:41AM (#14113867)

This is classic Black and White engineering advice, which shuns pragmatism because some idiot could come along and make a mess of the codebase. If someone is capable of displaying such bad judgement for such a trivial matter then they shouldn't be working on the code in the first place.

Take the Tensorflow codebase (and Google and Microsoft code, and linux in general). There are currently ~1,028 TODO's in Tensorflow, most of which refer to a particular engineer in the form TODO(<name>):<comment>. This is pragmatism and good judgement in action.

Software engineering is all kinds of shades of grey, competing considerations, trade-offs and balances. It's what makes it interesting.

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Re:Keeping track of technical debt in source code by Johnie on Friday April 14, 2017 @12:38PM (#14115438)

At Google, the team that I worked on required the format `// TODO(name): [Tracking Bug#] comment `

In other places, I've seen just blanket `// TODO: comment` is pretty bad. There's no accountability and also you don't know when it's obsolete.

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Re:Keeping track of technical debt in source code by hinkley on Saturday April 15, 2017 @02:04AM (#14119623)

Sometimes the TODO message doesn't make enough sense, and having the author gives you who to ask for context.

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Re:Keeping track of technical debt in source code by koverstreet on Saturday April 15, 2017 @07:47AM (#14120382)

That's what git blame is for

(I've got a thing in vim that runs git blame on the current line, and pops up the commit message in the quickfix window).

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Re:Keeping track of technical debt in source code by hinkley on Saturday April 15, 2017 @11:32AM (#14121140)

Git blame only works until code starts shifting around.

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