Technical Debt Simplified

This week I was in an airport restaurant, waiting to be seated. The restaurant was very busy, apparently short-staffed and there was a long line of weary, hungry, thirsty and somewhat grumpy travelers eagerly waiting to be seated. After a long wait, I was next in line for a seat. I stood on the customer side of the podium and patiently waited. A very busy waitress hustled toward the podium with several menus tucked under her arm like a football. As she hurried past the podium, in a single motion, she tossed the menus toward the top of the podium. They landed, hit the top of an existing stack of menus, and the momentum caused the tossed menus to keep going and spill down onto the floor. Additionally, the stack of menus that were already on the podium became disrupted. Some also fell onto the floor. Others menus that were neatly stacked, fell off the stack and onto the podium surface. The waitress, realizing what had just happened let out an exacerbated sigh of frustration coupled with an eye-roll. She then stopped, turned back toward the podium and proceeded to pick up all the menus that had fallen on the floor, as well as those that had become disorganized on the top of the podium. She neatly stacked all of the menus onto a uniform pile on top of the podium and hurried away to tend to her activities.

As I stood there watching all of this happen, I could not help but ask myself “how much extra time did that waitress just cost herself by tossing the menus as opposed to walking over to the podium and carefully placing the menus on top of the others already on the podium?” While very busy and obviously stressed out, she likely cost herself an extra 2 minutes by rushing through the work. In rushing and cutting corners, she made extra work for herself. And while she was re-working her pile of menus, she could have been serving customers. While in the moment it may have seemed to her like going slower and being careful was going to cost her extra time, it turns out it would have saved her 2 minutes. By going fast, she created debt for herself.

Do your teams do this when building software and rushing to meet a deadline? If so, what can you do about it?