Dear followers
As there is no way to "retweet" or "quote retweet", I have to do this kind of article.
I read this article
And I reacted here.
I'm curious to see what you are thinking about.
I would like to suggest you to reply in the thread of my reply to the article, but you can do it here too.
Thanks
I read your article and I loved it, but there is something I dislike about it.
I may have misunderstood something, so l let me explain.
First, I loved how you described these 3 points:
I agree with that definitions. Even if there is one point missing in that list: what about maintaining software.
For me, the most part of software life cycle, is to maintain a feature over the time.
OK, you bring a nice feature, marketing is happy, sales too. People tap on developer head "good boy", but then start the real life: maintaining what was just released.
The first part is about a few weeks: people cheers up
the second about years: people scratch their head or cry.
I maintain pieces of software for years. I'm not saying to show off my experience, but to explain what I do for living.
Some are more than 10 years old. Some are only a few months old.
For me, every single piece of code is potential technical debt. Even a piece of code you worked on last week.
As a maintainer, my goal is either to kill bugs, to remove feature, to migrate feature to a new stack or to refactor code.
We are all living in a legacy world, created by the people who worked here before, including us.
Yes, it's part of the development life cycle.
Yes, it's all about technical debt.
Technical debt exists, you can pass away when bringing a new feature. It's a choice. The fact it exists is not an excuse to do not deliver features.
Sometimes, we decide to refactor, sometimes we don't.
As you said, it's about planing.
No matter what you do, you are adding a piece of code that people will have to maintain.
My problem with your article is this:
That's almost a motivator way to see things. "There is no problem, everything is an opportunity". But you only changed the way to say things. And presented the first option as positive, while ignoring your developer feedbacks about the fact the code is either uneasy to maintain or will be even more difficult to maintain.
I agree with this:
But I still don't understand the purpose of your article.
Technical debt is a part of software development, but I'm not sure about your approach to stop calling it "technical debt".
As if calling a dog, a "grown up puppy" would it, make it more acceptable 😀, a puppy is still a dog.