I can't answer for Mick, but my thoughts are that business has only seen one way work; they assume that the debt can't be too critical since the code works.
They haven't seen the benefits of a strong CI/CD pipeline and the positive impact of proper testing. With these things in place, there is often time to go back and address the tech debt issues properly.
Addressing it in my experience is often the result a slow cultural shift toward code quality ownership, proper testing and pipelines, as well as a focus on writing clean, readable code. Combating the business has to be gradual ... but it can and needs to occur.
I'll probably write an article on my thoughts around actually paying down technical debt over the next few weeks - as well as some thoughts about communicating that debt to business in a way they can understand and make good decisions as a collective group.
I love these discussions, but I fear that the negative feelings in Mick's post are very common and I wonder what we can do as engineers to better expose, communicate, and solve these problems.
I agree about the negative feelings being very common ... in addition, if the developer is not strong (personality, not coding), they can get run-over by management. I've been there ...
Let me know when you get the article done and I'll add a link to this article.
This is something I think a lot of teams deal with. Why do you think business feels that way and how do you combat it?
I can't answer for Mick, but my thoughts are that business has only seen one way work; they assume that the debt can't be too critical since the code works.
They haven't seen the benefits of a strong CI/CD pipeline and the positive impact of proper testing. With these things in place, there is often time to go back and address the tech debt issues properly.
Addressing it in my experience is often the result a slow cultural shift toward code quality ownership, proper testing and pipelines, as well as a focus on writing clean, readable code. Combating the business has to be gradual ... but it can and needs to occur.
I'll probably write an article on my thoughts around actually paying down technical debt over the next few weeks - as well as some thoughts about communicating that debt to business in a way they can understand and make good decisions as a collective group.
I love these discussions, but I fear that the negative feelings in Mick's post are very common and I wonder what we can do as engineers to better expose, communicate, and solve these problems.
I'd love to see that article.
I agree about the negative feelings being very common ... in addition, if the developer is not strong (personality, not coding), they can get run-over by management. I've been there ...
Let me know when you get the article done and I'll add a link to this article.
Communicating Technical Debt
Matt Eland ・ Oct 2 ・ 10 min read
Added a reference to your article!
Excellent work!