Comments on: Agile Chronicles #12: Technical Debt

By: Ted

Ted — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 21:10:08 +0000

Been dipping into these articles over time and it is interesting to see some common scenarios and a vocabulary for them too that is not often covered in the places I read so thanks for that. Scrum clearly has many appealing concepts and I can see why it is valued it. One observation I would stress though is the importance of leadership in teams. My experience is that quality, strong, PMs and senior devs willing to show leadership are the most important key to a sane work environment and successful project. In the end there are great people I would follow whatever their plan and doofuses I would run away from even if their plan was perfect.

By: Keyston Clay

Keyston Clay — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 01:09:58 +0000

Great post. This is the main reason why I don't do website development anymore and more Software driven. I don't know if its just me, but I have been called in to work on , what I would call, dead end projects. Meaning that the previous developer didn't follow some of the basic practices, error checking,encapsulation, or basic structure in the code, basically following the mythology of "Throw it and see if it sticks". I understand that some cases OOP is out of scope, or you may not have the time, but I have yet to see any cases like that with any project I've done and if you are packaging this off as a production ready application some thought needs to be made. In regards to the bulk of this post, Technical Debt, through the years I have learned when its good to do a quick and dirty solution ( just to see if it works), then to spend a great deal of time to just have the client remove the functionality/use case. Its frustrating, but I have to agree with you : "itâ€s ok if your API is good and the code underneath it sucks" If your API is great or half decent, when the need to refactor comes into play, its not as painful. This is one thing I've learn over the years, and boy it has saved me alot of headaches. Your post has me looking more into Scum development.

By: Andreas RÃ¸nning

Andreas RÃ¸nning — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 17:35:53 +0000

Thank you for this post. I recently went through a project the aftermath of which essentially shook me to my core, and this article establishes a language I can use to analyze that situation and better understand why it happened.

One of the best dev-related articles I’ve read all year. Brilliant.