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Technical Debt Is An Avoidable Issue
Too many cooks spoil the programmatic broth.
One of the more nauseating things that I hear about a lot these days in the Grand Game of Software Engineering, and there are an awful lot of nauseating things I hear about I can tell you, is the subject of technical debt and the endless amount of hand wringing, in-meeting PowerPoints¹, and management tomfoolery that inevitably comes along with it.
A less experienced engineer starting out in the Grand Game might find it somewhat incredulous that any “professionally written” software project could knowingly leave behind a trail of half finished, undocumented, quickly outdated spaghetti code² that would cause endless problems through production bugs to hindering the addition of new developers.
But, of course, they don’t know the level of ineptitude, mismanagement, and process heavy nonsense that the rest of us have to deal with on a daily basis.
Such is the nature of modern corporate software development that it’s really all about releasing a product, any product, as quickly as possible and completely ignoring distractions such as proper testing, documentation, or (unsurprisingly) resultant quality.
They call it an “MVP”, I call it a half finished mishmash of undocumented and untested lukewarm garbage that would be laughed out of the…
