Explaining technical debt by analogy

2019-08-14

I was interested to read a post on the Squarespace engineering blog, 3 Good Types of Tech Debt, exploring the subject of tech debt. I think it’s good that the idea that tech debt is receiving though and attention; in this vein I’m somewhat reminded of A Taxonomy of Tech Debt.

The mental shift that the Squarespace article encourages you to make is from ‘tech debt is a blight on my project and a stain on my record as a developer’ towards ‘tech debt is a form of investment that, used wisely, can be extremely beneficial to your project’. The article explains more fulsomely.

Beyond helping your project succeed technically, I think that changing how you conceptualise tech debt can also help your non-technical stakeholders understand it; what it is, why it can be useful to incur, and when it needs to be paid off.

Similar benefits (to you, your project, and your organisation) can be achieved by shifting your understanding of architecture - it’s not about patterns and principles, it’s about selling options.

The more of these shifts that we’re able to achieve and communicate, as technologists, the less frictious the relationship between us and ‘the business’ will be, because we will be able more and more to deal in the same concepts.