Design debt economics

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A good post on technical debt - " Design debt economics: A vocabulary for describing the causes, costs, and cures for software maintainability problems"

The author recommends the book - Clean Code; A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship. (http://www.amazon.com/Clean-Code-Handbook-Software-Craftsmanship/dp/0132350882)

posted on Sunday, June 07, 2009 1:58 PM Print

Comments

# re: Design debt economics: royashbrook; 6/9/2009 2:19 PM; one issue i would take is that they put the "if it ain't broke don't fix it' type of debt equal with all the others. i would say that it's not and they have two distinct categories of design debt listed.

if we want to continue the analogy for taking out more debt, i would say that...
•Time pressure
•Lack of skills, ignorance, or apathy
•Isolated or disconnected teams/lack of quality feedback
•Inadequate standards

all count as things that cause ongoing damage whereas, generally...
•Programmer and management hesitance to improving code, for fear of introducing new problems: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

is more like continuing to pay the minimum. you never pay down the debt, but often it doesn't get worse. obviously over time, things degrade, but i could use a 'value of the dollar'/inflation type analogy on that.

probably wouldnt' help the message or enable with as much ease the ability for him to name drop all the ibm brands in there (puke), but i would say the goal of not producing crap anymore would generally be more important the the goal of going back and screwing around with bad code that functions. unless it functions bad enough to cause a business impact.

on the whole, a good article. good references, good facts, and a good presentation. i probably would never show the whole thing to an upper manager for fear i'd have to buy a bunch of ibm crap that he apparently can't stop himself from plugging later in the article. but maybe some careful editing if i ever sent it to someone with a budget would solve that problem.

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# re: Design debt economics: HarveyCONSUELO35; 8/29/2011 3:36 PM; It’s a really good data connected with university. Some guys would like to have such kind of great writing skillfulness. But they have to purchase the theses proposed by some professional dissertation writing.

# re: Design debt economics: pedestrian bridge; 1/17/2012 4:38 AM; I've been through that article and as I read it I now understands the importance of code maintainability for application owners and development teams.

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