Technical debt is rarely urgent

President Eisenhower is reputed to have said, ‘I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”

For the past year, I have been writing this book, Taming Your Dragon. It was important to me, as well as to Apress, my publisher. However, my deadline for submitting a manuscript was one year away, so I can hardly describe this task as urgent. During this time, I also wrote several proposals for papers at various software conferences. These tasks were considerably less important than writing this book. However, their deadlines were typically only a few weeks away, so whilst this second task was less important, it was always more urgent.

Finally, I frequently needed to create some slides or other presentation material for a client meeting in a few days. This task is the least important one, at least to me, although perhaps not to my employer. However, it at the time my most urgent task, so I was always prioritised working on those unimportant slides.

Technical debt is like the writing of my book – it is important, but rarely urgent. Therefore, it often lies low in our hierarchy of priorities.

The problem of balancing the needs of the urgent and the important is made more difficult by the tendency of many organisations to overload their employees, so that they always have many more things to do than they can sensibly accomplish. The result is that tasks become prioritised by urgency, not importance, and employees never look at important but non-urgent tasks until their level of urgency becomes higher than competing demands.

For organisations or projects that exist in a chronically firefighting mode of working, the insistent demands of addressing the firefighting problems means that addressing technical debt is never considered. In addition, when working in a firefighting mode, much higher levels of technical debt are invariably created, as the tactical solutions to pressing problems are so often dealt with, at least partially, by creating some technical debt.

In my next article, I’ll look at another reason why technical debt has been so resistant to solutions. Technical debt is not sexy.

#TechnicalDebt #TamingYourDragon #Apress