Debt Metaphor is not Technical Debt

Ward Cunningham's coined phrase "the debt metaphor" has caused some confusion. I've seen it mis phrased as "technical debt." This is a mistake because if you watch the linked video, you'll see that Ward is talking about your understanding of the features and the model, and not about going into debt by taking programming short cuts.

Let's take a look at how Extreme Programming does design. Kent Beck expresses the XP practices as taking the good things about development and turning the knob to eleven. This includes design. If design is good, don't relegate it to a phase of development then end that phase and start construction, i.e. big design upfront (BDUF). Do it all the time and allow the design to emerge. This is where the terms emergent design and evolutionary design began.

But if you are going to start writing code on day one, and only do enough design to complete the current story, then you are writing code with a smaller understanding of the problem than you would had you done BDUF. So you are going into design debt in order to allow the design to emerge. As your understanding grows, you can refactor the code to better reflect your new understanding. That's paying off the debt. For that to work, the code needs to be as clean as possible.

I see blogs and email posts talking about technical debt and tracking technical debt so you can pay it back. That's OK that they want to talk about technical debt, but sometimes I see them using Ward's debt metaphor as validation for this practice. Taking shortcuts, like not pairing, not doing TDD, not automating your acceptance tests, or just plane not writing clean code or refactoring to clean code will actually hamper your ability to pay back your design debt because now your code does not express the knowledge you have about the system as well as it should. You are cheating yourself in two ways. You are creating technical debt that the team will have to pay back in the form of refactoring or, more often, bug fixes, and you are severely hampering your ability to pay back the design debt because the code does not clearly express current design knowledge.

What's the point? First, don't take shortcuts. Be honest and firm with your customer and tell them that you are sorry, but she can only have 2 of the 3 must have features for the upcoming trade show. And second, if you think it's OK to go into technical debt to please your customer, don't think that is what the debt metaphor enables. For the debt metaphor to work, you absolutely can not go into technical debt. Period.

Open Letter to Yahoo!

This is off topic for this blog, but I need to get it off my chest. I'll try to be civil. At least more civil than LaGarrette Blount.

Dear Yahoo!

I'm kicking you to the curb. I just can't take it anymore. Here's something I know you won't be able to believe, I'm writing this blog using Firefox on a machine running Ubunut 8.04. Really. Blogger.com actually runs in Firefox on Linux. Cool huh? I don't know how they do either. Well, actually I do 'cause I'm not a Steve Balmer boot boy.

That's right, I'm tired of seeing "This Yahoo! application doesn't work on your browser/OS." Do you know what a 'web application' is? Do you? It's an application that runs on the web, not just on IE in Windows. But if you took any time away from sucking up to Microsoft trying to get them to buy your sorry ass to learn anything about the world wide web, HTML, or standards, you'd already know that.

So go ahead and pander to the Microsoft world. Here's some news, Firefox is the most popular browser in Europe. But what do you care. Europe's only got like 830.4 million people. I'm sure you don't need any of that revenue to maintain your distant second place to Google in search engine revenue.

And here's another little piece of news. YOU ARE THE ONLY FANTASY FOOTBALL SITE THAT CHARGES FOR LIVE UPDATES. CBS Sportline? FREE! ESPN?, FREE! FoxSports? FREE! Maybe if you wrote applications that ran across browsers and OSes, you'd generate enough advertising revenue to offer it for free, but until then, I'm not playing your crappy fantasy games either.

And I'm not using your mail application. Trying to make it look like Outlook doesn't make it better. GMail doesn't look like Outlook, but those hackers over at Google innovate. Really innovate, not the fake innovation your potential bed fellows at Microsoft claim to do. They innovate by doing things new and different. Sorta like in the spirit of what the word innovate actually means. I don't know how I tolerated that spam infested Outlook copying piece of garbage for as long as I did.

And my.yahoo.com? Kicked to the curb. And I'm not using your search engine either. Not that it's a bad search engine, it's just that it's not Google. And you are Yahoo! At least your shenanigans make clear how you picked you name.

So you can count me as just one not Windows using potential revenue source that you no longer have. Never ever will yahoo.com enter my browser in any form what so ever. I'm sure I won't be missed. After all, you'll be able to con enough people into using your crap to keep you afloat. I mean, look at all those people who fall for Nigerian phishing scams. I'm sure you look at them as potential clients. Not that targeting Windows users is a bad strategy. Last I checked it's still the most popular OS. Falling like a rock. But still number one. No, it's that targeting Windows users is the least common denominator. Your stuff feels like Google stole all your real developers, and you have to make due with ASP.NET hackers who don't know a COM object from an ActiveX control (Hint, they're the same thing 'cause when COM/OLE failed, Microsoft rebranded it as ActiveX). I don't believe that, it just feels that way when I use, or used to use, your crap. I trust you're doing the best you can. Your best is just not good enough anymore.

Ciou!

Don't know about you, but I feel better :)