
On technical debt - techterrier
https://medium.com/p/7bac65edf349
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brudgers
One often overlooked feature shared by technical and real debt is discharge
via bankruptcy. One of the impediments to understanding technical debt, I
think, is that our primary experience with bankruptcy is with personal
bankruptcy and it's potential effects on credit score. When technical debt is
discharged via bankruptcy, it is more like commercial bankruptcy...it's an
organization or a project that dissolves with the debt and there are no direct
personal consequences for an individual's credit score.

To put it another way, technical debt doesn't have to be repaid if the
product/project/company fails. Even better it doesn't have to be repaid if the
company succeeds to a scale where the library/product/project becomes
obsolescent and must be replaced for reasons that could not have been
reasonably anticipated at the time the first iteration was created.

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techterrier
Absolutely! One of the reasons I wrote this post was experiences gained
working in a team that had in effect become insolvent (in the tech debt
sense).

In the end we went for a combination of large re-writes (which we didn't feel
good about, heeding Joel Spolskys advice) and Strangulation Architecture.

~~~
brudgers
This is all second hand from listening to Spolsky's podcasts.

Spolsky's advice regarding rewrites highlights perhaps different kinds of
technical debt. The code for Fogbugz was _well written_ VBscript and the
motivation for Wasabi was expanding the market for Fogbugz to Linux...I
believe this produced an incremental increase of about 10% of sales.

Wasabi was a tool that supported the product and where the technical debt
accrued. We might call the issue with Fogbugz "platform debt" and at the time
Fogbugz was written, few people would have anticipated the growth of
Linux...and based on Spolsky's description of sales, focusing on Windows was a
sound platform choice -- in 2000 Fogbugz would have been unlikely to have
succeeded in its market as a web based product.

