The leaky boat — A different analogy for technical debt
I’ve come to realize that the analogy behind the term “technical debt” might be somewhat flawed. Technical people understand it, as we live and breathe with it every day, but for manager and other non-technical people I think we’re actually sending the wrong message. I think more companies than ever is a at point with their applications and services where the legacy is taking it’s toll. The way we’re able to manage that going forward can be make or break for a lot of applications, and making sure that the management actually understand this is key for us to even have a chance of dealing with this!
Therefore, lets spend some time delving on words. Debt is a familiar term to most of us, you can bough some now but you must repay it with interest. And the clever girls and guys with economics degrees have about a trillion ways of doing very clever stuff with debt, restructuring, trading, you name it. And that is part of the problem by using that term to describe our technical challenges, as we have very different tools to handle our particular kind of debt.
So let my try out a different analogy. Your application is a boat. And is probably not even a very good boat. Sorry, let’s face it. It’s an old, wooden rowboat or maybe a large, old, battle scared pirate ship. And it leaks, and there is quite a bit of rainwater accumulated…
