Technical Debt: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly by Gabe Elias

Technical debt is often described as a metaphor… a metaphor that is also described as one that is hard to explain.

Coined by Ward Cunningham in 1992, the debt metaphor describes how software projects “borrow from the future” as increasing system complexity inevitably impedes a team’s capability to deliver business value over time.

At 30 years old, the metaphor is now a ubiquitous gremlin, inflating software development project costs, while pushing business value yields to the downside.

To make sense of this problem, this Drinking Dialogue will outperform the metaphor by examining technical debt as a form of “symbolic currency”, one that enables software teams to make assumptions about how systems will behave when embedded in a wider reality of interactions that are often contradictory and subject to change—especially when humans are involved.

In this crash course of applied social theory, we'll explore a variety of perspectives to elaborate "tech debt" as enabling and constraining the conversion of such cultural capital into economic capital:

The Good: We’ll introduce Ward Cunningham's “Debt Metaphor” through Ray Dalio’s view into the relationship between debt cycles and economic growth.

The Bad: Next, we’ll delve into Martin Fowler’s understanding of the way “cruft” multiplies confusion within a code base by doing an actual code review—read through the lens of David Graeber’s study of debt as a deeply embedded morality that enables the socio-cultural integration of economic systems.

The Ugly: Lastly, we’ll take Gideon Kunda’s perspective into “the Setting” of software development to observe technical debt as a by-product from the contradictory ways time-biased organizational forms tend to impede the flow of socio-cultural capital, the crucial resource that helps teams avoid technical bankruptcy.

Links:

• Ward Cunningham: https://shorturl.at/uFY04
• Ray Dalio: https://shorturl.at/MTU37
• Martin Fowler: https://shorturl.at/euI09
• David Graeber: https://shorturl.at/azFO4
• Gideon Kunda: https://shorturl.at/fzIJU
• Pierre Bourdieu: https://shorturl.at/avGL7

Gabe Elias biography
Gabe Elias applies social theory in Toronto, Canada.