in reply to RFC: Exploring Technical Debt

I read an article sometime in the last year that described explicitly taking on technical debt in order to get a project done before a conference. The author described it in terms of taking out a loan to help a business, knowing that the loan would need to be repaid with interest.

I need to find that article again.

G. Wade

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: RFC: Exploring Technical Debt
by gwadej (Chaplain) on Sep 24, 2009 at 15:55 UTC

    The article was older than I thought: Voluntary Technical Debt.

    This article and Steve McConnell's work introduced me to potential benefits of technical debt. I had seen this (without a good term for it) from really good programmers in the past. But, this was the best explanation I had seen.

    G. Wade
[reply]

      Thanks for the link! I had read this before, but it was worth revisiting. I especially like McConnell's distinction between long and short-term debt.

      This is basically the kind of thing I'm looking for, but I'd like to see more details. In other words, more analogies between financial and development concepts.

      As soon as I have the spare cycles, I'm going to write up a hypothetical project scenario, and explore some of the equations that whakka proposed. I think that a narrative might be easier for me to understand than a formal model.

      Jeffrey Thalhammer
      Imaginative Software Systems

[reply]

In Section Meditations