Unfortunately we can't avoid 1 and 2. 4 is the usual reason for management to resist catching up on tech debt - to some extent I don't blame them because they don't see any explicit business value from resolving tech debt, while if doing so breaks anything there would be immediate business cost.
I definitely think "immediate" business cost is the difference. Tech debt has a long term business cost in that it can slow down and block certain types of development. It can get to a point where we can no longer work with it and we might feel we need to completely rewrite a feature to do what we want. This is a truth all engineers understand, but is hard to estimate and prove the long term impacts though.
Well, on top of hard to quantify the long term cost, it's even harder to convince people who only need to worry about the short-term impact, to care about the longer term - I mean, between the manager who is looking for the promotion after next successful release, and the contractor who knows their contract is up in another year...
Oh well, I feel like I'm borderline ranting at this point. :-)
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Unfortunately we can't avoid 1 and 2. 4 is the usual reason for management to resist catching up on tech debt - to some extent I don't blame them because they don't see any explicit business value from resolving tech debt, while if doing so breaks anything there would be immediate business cost.
I definitely think "immediate" business cost is the difference. Tech debt has a long term business cost in that it can slow down and block certain types of development. It can get to a point where we can no longer work with it and we might feel we need to completely rewrite a feature to do what we want. This is a truth all engineers understand, but is hard to estimate and prove the long term impacts though.
Well, on top of hard to quantify the long term cost, it's even harder to convince people who only need to worry about the short-term impact, to care about the longer term - I mean, between the manager who is looking for the promotion after next successful release, and the contractor who knows their contract is up in another year...
Oh well, I feel like I'm borderline ranting at this point. :-)