Introduction
Technical debt sounds like one of those very technical product management problems. Something involving legacy code, ageing architecture and conversations with engineers that end with, “It’s more complicated than that.”
But technical debt is really about a much simpler idea: the things we choose not to deal with today have a habit of becoming more expensive tomorrow.
And for that, you need look no further than the kitchen sink.
Watch Technical debt from the shoffice
Louise is temporarily working from her shoffice, part shed, part office, while some household maintenance takes place indoors. Which got her thinking about all the other maintenance we put off and the debt we create when we do.
The tempting shortcut
It’s 9pm. The dishwasher is full of clean dishes. The sink has dirty ones in it. You could spend 15 minutes sorting everything out. Or you could think: I’ll do it tomorrow.
And sometimes that’s a perfectly reasonable decision.
The problem comes when tomorrow arrives.
Suddenly someone needs a cereal bowl that’s still in the dishwasher. Something you need is buried underneath everything in the sink. The toast is burning. The PE kit has disappeared.
And that pan with last night’s bolognese? What would have taken a couple of minutes to clean yesterday now needs soaking and considerably more effort. Your debt has started charging interest.
Technical debt works the same way
Product teams make similar decisions all the time. Take the shortcut. Leave the ageing code alone. Work around the problem. Get the feature shipped and promise to come back later.
None of those decisions is necessarily wrong. But debt accumulates.
Eventually developers start saying things like, “Don’t touch that bit of code.” New features take longer to build. Simple changes become surprisingly complicated. And the maintenance nobody had time for suddenly gets in the way of the work everybody wants to do.
Just like the dishwasher, you can’t keep loading new things in forever without occasionally emptying it.
Good maintenance is almost invisible
There’s another interesting thing about technical debt. When somebody regularly empties the dishwasher, nobody notices. When nobody empties it, everybody notices.
Technical maintenance is often the same. Keeping systems healthy doesn’t necessarily produce an exciting new feature to demonstrate. But neglect it for long enough and eventually the consequences become very visible indeed.
Not all debt is bad debt
The answer isn’t to eliminate every piece of technical debt immediately. Sometimes taking on debt is a conscious trade-off.
Perhaps getting something to market quickly matters more today. Perhaps the team knows it has capacity to address the underlying issue next sprint.
That’s fine. The important thing is to recognise the debt, understand the consequences and have a realistic plan for paying it back.
Because there’s a big difference between choosing to leave the dishes until tomorrow and simply allowing them to pile up indefinitely.
So next time your team discusses technical debt, perhaps there’s a simpler question to ask:
What’s in your sink, and how long are you prepared to leave it there?
Watch Louise explain why a dishwasher full of clean dishes, a sink full of dirty ones and some dried-on bolognese have rather more in common with product development than you might think.
