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by galaxyLogic 1267 days ago
Right the management would be in charge of course. They would decide whether a given TDEBT-issue should be worked on as a "secondary project" perhaps or not. I think they would still appreciate having the knowledge of the technical debt their company is taking on. You don't need to do anything about (technical or other kind of) debt until you have the money and will to get rid of it. But it's still valuable to know about it I think they would agree.

There's so many kinds of discussions going on in developer communications. Establishing a channel for technical debt within a project would seem to be not the worst waste of time.

1 comments

I do agree... but I'm a FTE in that's been in my current position for 7 years. I'm not worrying about which way the burn down charts go (and sigh when the estimation is removed - well, at least it's in the history).

I occasionally think about how to implement PEF/REV ( https://www.fincher.org/tips/General/SoftwareDevelopment/Bug... - though https://lostgarden.home.blog/2008/05/20/improving-bug-triage... is another approach) in Jira (long ago, I was part way through implementing it as a plugin in Redline).

The issues that I've had is that as long as there is someone else that is doing the maintenance or support, or the tenure of the developer is closer to the job hopping average - technical debt is ignored at nearly every level.

> technical debt is ignored at nearly every level.

I agree. Technical debt is bad/evil and many (short-sighted) managers try to see no evil hear no evil speak no evil.

They don't want to tell their bosses the software is a maintenance nightmare which will cost the company dearly in the future.

I think we need a new better notion of "code ownership". People who write the code should in some sense "own" it. Only that way they will have a true incentive to make code maintainable and to minimize technical debt. The manager should of course own their shared of the code-ownership. They helped decide what should be in it and what not.