Tech Debt Stinks!

I have had a realisation over the course of the last week. Tech debt smells.

It smells to the point that it got me thinking about how to explain tech debt to non-techies.

(As an aside, for 'techie' and 'non-techies', insert your role, and your shareholder's. This applies equally to finance, HR or whatever they're calling it today, engineering, marketing, customer support, legal, logistics, PR, etc. In other words, we all have tech debt.)

The normal analogy I've heard is that tech debt is like a credit card: temporary loan, with a high-rate of interest. Incurring tech debt can speed you up (during startup phase, for example), but eventually the interest eats you alive. You *must* pay it back or declare bankruptcy (throw away the offending debt).

I don't feel that really captures how techies see it...

Picture yourself one day, standing in your lounge. You're just about to leave on an errand...when you realise you *really* have to go to the bathroom.

You think to yourself, "Well, I'll clean it up later, and I don't really have time right now..." so you poop on your floor. You finish, and can get on with your day much faster than if you'd have bothered to go to the toilet.

Great. Now, as you walk through your lounge, you have to walk around this thing. It's smelly, sure, and a little inconvenient, but it's only one or two steps out of your way each time, and you're really terribly busy.

A couple days later, you are in your lounge, and realise that again, you *really* have to go, and *really* don't have time. After all, there's already /one/ poo on the floor...

So now you have two. Trips through the lounge are smellier, and a little more obstructed.

Picture this happening for weeks, months or years.

Now, the lounge is is in bad shape. The smell is unbearable, you can't get across the room, and the viability of your whole house is at risk. You've got one of 3 options, none of which are particularly nice:

1. Take the time, get out the rubber gloves, and clean that all up.
2. Gut the lounge, and rebuild it. The cost might only be a little more than all the effort to clean, after all.
3. You burn the house to the ground and consider moving to a neighbourhood where sensible people don't do this sort of thing.

<ahem>

I hear you thinking "Well, that was a bit graphic..."

Yes. Yes, in fact, it was. That's kind of the point. The credit-card analogy is losing it's punch. People (read 'stakeholders') are no longer afraid of it.

I understand that sometimes you simply *must* create tech debt to get a job done. There might not be an option today...but you had better sort it out tomorrow.