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How to tackle technical debt
Identifying it, making an argument, then getting on with it
Mining for debt
Recently on Slack one of my colleagues shared this comic from Monkey User.
I thought it was a great metaphor.
The world of software moves extremely fast. Inside a given company the codebase is constantly changing with the addition of new features. Outside the company is an entire world of open source software development, shipping updates to all of the libraries, frameworks and databases that are being used.
With time, piling on ever more code creates moments where the team needs to stop and take a step back. They will need to think of a different way of moving forward that is more maintainable, controlled and less prone to bugs.
Even if the internal codebase changes extremely slowly, external dependencies are always releasing new versions, requiring the team to upgrade them before they reach end of life. This can create further technical debt as APIs deprecate or breaking changes are introduced.
