Re:The Cost Center Trap
by majormajor on Monday November 20, 2017 @07:55PM
(#15744706)
In most orgs like this that I've seen, it leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of tech debt.
Messy code is painful so the answer is sought, when we don't have much experience, in what we learned in classes and books: elegant abstractions. But we end up abstracting business logic in such a way that when the business needs to change, our code can't change with it, and that's when we have true tech debt of the "let's rewrite the world!" sort. It might be beautifully designed abstraction, but if it's tied to the features of yesterday too much, it's going to become increasingly brittle and painful.
Now when someone says "we can ship this sooner but it'll be hacky and introduce tech debt to make the code re-usable" I'm much happier, and would rather have the code not be intended to be re-used until we prove that we understand how we'll want to use it next time.
Messy code is painful so the answer is sought, when we don't have much experience, in what we learned in classes and books: elegant abstractions. But we end up abstracting business logic in such a way that when the business needs to change, our code can't change with it, and that's when we have true tech debt of the "let's rewrite the world!" sort. It might be beautifully designed abstraction, but if it's tied to the features of yesterday too much, it's going to become increasingly brittle and painful.
Now when someone says "we can ship this sooner but it'll be hacky and introduce tech debt to make the code re-usable" I'm much happier, and would rather have the code not be intended to be re-used until we prove that we understand how we'll want to use it next time.