The 800 Pound Technical Debt Collection Gorilla

Michael Feathers, the amazing author of Working Effectively with Legacy Code, posted recently about technical debt.

What happens to code when you don’t refactor? Anyone with any experience knows the answer. It gets messy. It becomes hard to change and the rate at which you can add features slows to a crawl.
I was on a project that inherited a tremendous amount of technical debt. The motivating force for the original team was meeting a hard deadline. As the deadline approached development process crumbled. Hero developers shot from the hip. Corners were cut. Non-critical bugs piled up. Quality was sacrificed to meet the deadline.

The technical debt was put on the American Express.

At the end of the project, the resulting application had a week long eventful launch full of rapid critical bug fix releases. The application was eventually brought up to an acceptable level of performance through Herculean effort of very skilled and talented people.

The technical debt bill was left ignored.

The following project cycle a new team was introduced to the application. A feature set to be added was defined. A deadline was set. A new requirement was added. All new features would have a emphasis on quality. No defects would be added to the already limping system.

The technical debt went into Universal Default and the APR was bumped up to 29%.

The team began moving forward except this time the business actively using the system kept running into critical issues that the team had to quickly deal with. The short cuts taken by the previous team became direct roadblocks to the new features slowing the implementation down. Each new line of code had to make sacrifices to work around quirks in the code base.

The 800 pound technical debt collection gorilla started calling demanding payment.

After a year of use the sheer size of the technical debt in the database caused leaks to spring which cascaded outward through out the application. New releases were viewed with dread by the entire organization. The DBA's were not happy. The help desk was not happy. The users were not happy. Morale on the project was through the floor.

The 800 pound technical debt collection gorilla had frozen all assets and put a lean on the house.

You can put that debt on the card. You can ignore it and buy some time. But eventually that gorilla is going to find you, climb on your back and beat you down.