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Showing posts from June, 2008

technical investment

My colleague Matt Heusser is doing this workshop on technical debt soon. I posted a little meditation on techdebt as impedance mismatch , but that seems to me to be trivially true, facile. Since I made The Software Artists public, though, I've been fielding a lot of questions on the software-test mail list that has me rethinking my position on technical debt. So here is what I *really* think: Technical debt doesn't really exist. At least, it doesn't exist for high-performing software teams. It's a useful concept for those encumbered by poor programming and poor testing, but the idea ceases to be useful about the time the code base becomes manageable. I have a graph and and I have a metaphor that both explain my position. I'll just describe the graph because I'm too lazy to hunt down some free software to draw it. This graph describes a couple of different projects I've been involved in, for a couple of different employers. The critical line on the gra