Choosing Technical Debt to Unbreak Platforms
What is technical debt and how does it unbreak a platform? Technical debt is the ongoing cost of maintenance for a piece of software. This is the literal money that’s spent on the runtime environment, the time spent operating and updating it, and customer satisfaction. Just like monetary debt, technical debt can pile up. As the amount snowballs, the team can’t incur new debt or deliver new features as all their working hours are spent on mitigating the current issues.
Indicators that a team is inundated with technical debt are easy to spot: are your teams attempting to maintain extremely outdated software? Do you have systems that are operationally fragile and/or prone to crashing? Do you use unnecessarily complex software?
If you answer any of those questions with yes, there’s a corresponding cost. For instance, updating, securing, and operating outdated software ranges from very costly to impractical. Operationally...