Tech Debt won’t kill you. I firmly believe that. However, I realize that people believe certain things are “technical debt” when they really aren’t. This happens because they don’t have another term to capture what is happening. So they turn to “tech debt” as an umbrella term.
Let’s stop doing that. Let’s offer up another phrase to more accurately capture what is happening.
Technical debt are decisions that will eventually need to be re-visited after a certain amount of time. On a long enough timeline, every single thing is technical debt. Eventually even computers will change so fundamentally that you’ll need to change even the simplest code.
But some decisions escalate risk. That is not technical debt. Even if it is a technical decision in nature, it is not debt. It won’t eventually become a problem. It is a problem in the very moment you’ve made the decision.
This is why technical debt will not kill you. Escalating risk will absolutely destroy you, your product, and your company. Here are a few things I’ve experienced that escalate risk.
Sometimes it isn’t even about code. All business systems include the humans that use those systems. A lack of communication between the people changing the system (engineers) and the people using the system is one of the riskiest propositions of all. That goes both ways. Without managing changes, explicitly, on how people are going to use the system differently, or what changes are being proposed is going to cause chaos.
I have seen corner-cases ignored with the explicit statement of “that won’t happen”. I guarantee you’re wrong, I guarantee that it will happen. Once it does happen you better have an answer. There is a clock running from the moment you deploy until that corner-case is hit, and you have zero control over how fast, and how randomly that clock ticks. The bigger your system and the more people are on it, the faster it ticks. Its one thing to not address a corner-case, but one surefire way to make it worse; not even alerting within the system that the corner-case was hit.
Those are some higher-risk examples. But let me give you a lower-risk example: not enough logging. Once a system is even close to something we consider “complex” there will be unexpected errors. Errors that don’t seem to be possible. Errors you cannot possibly hope to reproduce in dev. Errors that won’t stop. If you don’t have all the data you need to solve it at hand, you’ve added just a little bit of risk. If you’re experiencing this problem now I highly recommend looking into honeycomb.io (Disclaimer: I do not work there, they are just that awesome).
Read more: Not Everything Is Tech Debt
Engineers place too high a value on erasing technical debt. Over time I’m come to agree with the value that management places on erasing technical debt. There is a time and place to fix it. But it is definitely not first. And it is probably not now.
We engineers need to remember that the cleanest, purest, technology and code doesn’t necessarily win. Because winning is about winning with customers and solving their problems.
I forget that my biggest fight is not with the computer, the compiler, or the system. That is merely a secondary fight to get the job done. The real fight is making sure you solve the right problem.
Solving the wrong problem—or no problem—is how you kill your company and product. Fix your tech debt when it becomes a pain point. But that pain is not fatal. For all the tech companies that we have seen fail I cannot remember a single one whose failure story included technical debt.
Read more: Technical Debt Will Not Kill You