

Ask HN: How much (technical) debt does your team owe? - andrewstuart

OK so you are working on some awesome new (or existing) application.<p>But there&#x27;s no way your team can get it all done of course, so a certain amount of stuff gets skipped and pushed into the technical debt account.<p>What is your development culture like in regards to technical debt - is accumulating debt encouraged?  Is there a huge amount of technical debt or a minimal amount?<p>Does the amount of technical debt concern you?
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partisan
In general, we try to avoid technical debt and instead take on functional
debt, cutting features and falling back to workarounds where they exist.

When dealing with a technical-debt-laden code base, it's important to
communicate to the people who set the priorities that changes become more time
consuming and buggy as the code continues to be added upon. I did this at my
last job and they understood the risks and impacts. They determined that they
would give me the time to make changes, but not to refactor. My estimates just
got longer and longer and business went on as usual. At least I wasn't held to
unrealistic deadlines.

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atentaten
My team has accumulated some technical debt. Some of it is refactoring. Some
of it can be labeled as bugs. I realized that some bugs are not worth dealing
with. Many of them are edge cases or things that are so small that they don't
warrant the time in fixing them in a complex system.

We allocate about 10-15% of items in each sprint to technical debt.

I would not say that tech debt is encouraged. And it would concern me if large
amounts of technical debt is being accumulated.

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not_a_test_user
I'm currently working in web agency so speed > anything else.

The amount of technical debt we have shipped dwarfs the GPD of a small
country.

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notduncansmith
The project I most recently left: very little technical debt.

The legacy project I've been moved onto: Dave Ramsey couldn't save it.

