Link: The Technical Debt Snowball Effect

A good read if you work on software that needs to keep changing for years.

We’ve been around long enough to learn that keeping a system healthy has to happen continuously – not during some mythical “technical debt sprint” or entire system rewrite. We’ve done those too, and believe us, they’re painful for both us and our clients. The problem is that regular maintenance is hard to sell. As companies grow, the focus naturally shifts toward new features and expanding the business, while the legacy quietly accumulates.

As Nat puts it nicely:

The problem with "tech debt" as a metaphor is that businesses like debt. There's such a thing as "the right amount" of debt for a business. It's not zero.

At Raketa, we try to bridge the gap between business growth and technical health by measuring complexity, test coverage, performance, dependencies and SBOMs – making the invisible a little more visible. We also reserve capacity and offer a separate team to keep this work independent from feature delivery and avoid conflicts.

Basically, we put a fixed, predictable cost on a hard-to-define risk.

That's why we particularly liked this article. It articulates not only the compounding effect of small technical compromises, but also the compound effect of regular, small improvements.

Read the full article over at Nat Bennett's blog:
https://www.simplermachines.com/the-tech-debt-snowball-2/