A Taxonomy of Technical Debt

Re:A Taxonomy of Technical Debt by badloginagain on Wednesday April 11, 2018 @03:32PM (#16814661)

One of the biggest problems of this is the tribal knowledge that develops around it. I worked at a studio that had something very similar to EASTL, but had joined the studio after an exodus of senior people.

It meant I had no idea how to use the custom libs. No documentation, no one left in the office to tell me how its used, no Stack Overflow to answer even trivial questions.

I left after less than a year. The studio closed down 2 months after I left.

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Re:A Taxonomy of Technical Debt by mattnewport on Thursday April 12, 2018 @10:48AM (#16821467)

EASTL mostly doesn't have this problem because it as far as possible is a compliant implementation of the STL with a few specific extensions, mostly around memory management. It's not a library that provides STL-like functionality with a different API. Much of the custom allocator stuff has finally now been superseded with polymorphic allocators in C++17.

Source: former maintainer of EASTL (not the original author).

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Re:A Taxonomy of Technical Debt by badloginagain on Thursday April 12, 2018 @02:14PM (#16823469)

I would imagine that being a larger organization, there are dedicated resources for at least some documentation/POC's for questions/changes/etc.

The smaller the company, the less resources you have to maintain, the more issues you're going to run into.

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