← Back to team overview

elementary-dev-community team mailing list archive

Managing technical debt

 

Hey guys,

Since we're getting closer to release, we'll inevitably end up cutting
back on some architectural improvements, use some temporary hackish
solutions or just don't merge some invasive fixes because it's too
late in the cycle. As you probably know, this is called technical debt
and it's OK to have some before release as long as it doesn't grow out
of control (like in OpenOffice.org) and as long as it's all rectified,
cleaned up and prettified after release (Ubuntu is a vivid example of
not doing that; hence
http://netsplit.com/2011/09/08/new-ubuntu-release-process/).

So to avoid the galling experience of those two projects, we should be
able to manage technical debt and take time to get rid of it after the
release and before starting hacking on the new cycle. To manage it,
let's report a bug for every FIXME in the code, everything you want to
refactor or implement in a cleaner way and tag these bugs
"technical-debt". This way a list of all such reports will be
accessible at https://bugs.launchpad.net/elementary/+bugs?field.tag=technical-debt
An example of such bug report can be found at
https://bugs.launchpad.net/elementaryos/+bug/1019814

Let's live long and be a prosperous project.

--
Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff


Follow ups