Another of the great breakout sessions at Northeast Dreamin’ 2023 last week was by Hunter Dunbar. His session was called, “The Leverage and Luggage of Technical Debt”. Here’s a summary of that session.
Let’s start with a definition.
Technical debt, tech debt, or code debt, is the result of the shortcuts taken by the development team to speed up the delivery of a piece of functionality. Usually the results need to be refactored at a later stage.
Why would a business decide to accept tech debt? Well, the reason is in the definition: to speed up the delivery of a piece of functionality.
This means an organization can go-to-market faster when not producing perfect code or automation. Side note: I would argue there’s no such thing as perfect code or automation, only something that is “good enough”.
A proof of concept (POCs) that morphs into a full feature is a great example of tech debt. The POC was probably hastily done, works well enough, and is promoted to the main development branch. It may break under too much stress, but that’s OK for right now. Why, because it just works.
The takeaway
If you spend too much time on trying to perfect your code, you’ll never release it. As the saying goes, “Done is better than perfect”.