launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

We identified at a recent meeting that Launchpad wanted to take some
time to retire technical debt and polish off nearly-finished features,
which I think is great.

I see Curtis is recently tagging lots of bugs across lp and bzr as
being tech-debt.  A tag seems potentially quite useful if you want to
either: allocate a time slice specifically to fixing these bugs, or to
count how many such bugs were fixed or how many remain.

However the particular bugs he's tagging seem a bit random to me, and
many of them do not seem very important -- like say
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/325883 where abentley specifically
says "this is not worth fixing".   Curtis says he's doing this based
on XXX comments in the code, but to me that seems only very weakly
correlated with something being tech debt.

One outcome of this could be removing XXX comments that are obsolete,
but unless you're already touching that code the payoff seems very
small.

To me tech debt is something you had to leave unfinished, or something
that will get in the way of later changes.
<http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TechnicalDebt>  It seems like you could only
identify them by asking developers to tag bugs that actually annoy
them now, or are nagging their conscience, not things they just
happened to mention in passing ages ago.

Maybe the thing to do is to let developers tag tech debt when they see
it, and to just track how many such bugs are actually fixed.
-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>