The Spilled Juice Analogy for Technical Debt

 

Imagine this: You go home tonight, you walk into your kitchen, and you see that there is orange juice spilled on the floor.  You’re the only one home, you know that you didn’t spill the juice, but there it is on the floor anyway.  This is clearly a problem.  What do you do?

Odds are that you clean it up, because you’re an adult and that’s what adults do.  You don’t walk through the orange juice because that would track it through the rest of your home, making the problem worse.  You could leave the juice there on the floor in the hopes that someone else will come along and clean it up. But if that doesn’t happen you run the risk of your dog lapping it up, and then getting sick from it because citrus is poisonous to dogs.  The problem will have gotten worse. Or perhaps the juice will slowly dry up, attracting all sorts of bugs, once again the problem gets worse.  Additionally, you’ll be forced to constantly walk around the spilled juice thereby slowing you down.  But luckily you’re an adult so you take a few minutes to clean up the juice and thereby avoid these obvious problems.

Now imagine this: You go to work tomorrow, you open up a Word document or begin working with a data from an existing database, and you discover some technical debt.  Perhaps the wording in the document isn’t very clear or perhaps the data has inconsistencies, or there’s a myriad of other issues.  This is clearly a problem.  What do you do?

Odds are that you do nothing about it.  You’d like to do something about it, you yearn to do something about it, but you perceive yourself as not having the authority to do so.  Or perhaps you don’t have the time to fix the problem because you need to focus on getting that document to your boss.  Or perhaps you don’t have the skills to fix the problem, or the tools to do so, or even recognize that the problem can be fixed (for example, many data quality problems exist because the vast majority of data professionals haven’t learned fundamental techniques such as database testing and database refactoring).  Or perhaps you don’t have the funding to fix the technical debt because your leadership doesn’t understand it and as a result chooses to fund new work over paying down technical debt.  Or perhaps you see the problem as being overwhelming, not realizing that you can chip away at it a little bit at a time.  Or perhaps you realize that you can safely ignore the problem and let the next person to run into it to worry about it, just like someone in the past has clearly done to you. The point is that you have a litany of excuses to choose from for why you can’t fix the technical debt, so unlike the orange juice spill you don’t clean up the mess.

Unfortunately, just like the orange juice spill, the technical debt problem will only get worse.  You’ll build write new information in addition to the poor quality writing, adding to your overall technical debt.  You’ll propagate the poor quality data through yet another part of your application, adding to your overall technical debt.  You’ll add new tests (hopefully) for the new functionality you’re adding but won’t take the time to add tests in for the existing functionality, adding to the cost of that existing technical debt.  How can this possibly be a good thing for you, or for your organization?

The solution of course is that we need to take responsibility.  This is a choice.  It takes time and it takes investment in yourself.  Just as it took you years to build up the habit of cleaning up spilled juice when you see it (I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that when you were a child you had to be told to clean up the juice many times before you built up the automatic habit) it will also take time to build up the habit of automatically addressing technical debt when you discover it.  While you are on your learning path you’ll also need to convince your colleagues to do the same.  You’ll also need to work with others to understand the implications of technical debt and help convince them to invest in paying it down.  As an organization you need to choose to dig your way out of the technical debt pit.

Related Reading

• 11 Strategies for Dealing With Technical Debt