#LIL PREPO SOUNDCLOUD HOW TO#

New feature development stops because the value gained is not proportional to the effort required.īad experiences with the system breed reluctance to work with the system at all, institutional knowledge of it gradually erodes, upgrades are postponed or simply don’t happen, and eventually someone puts a comment in the system’s README file that says something like “Never change this system again.” Everyday Productivity LossesĮven for systems that haven’t reached the maintainability tipping point, tech debt can cause constant issues and increase development time, developer stress, and potential bugs.Ī classic example of this problem is a test suite with one or more intermittently failing tests. The only way to extend the system is to add more tech debt. Changes either take too long, are too difficult to test, or carry an unacceptably high risk of unintended consequences. How Much Tech Debt is Too Much? The Tech Debt Tipping PointĪ system with too much tech debt eventually becomes unmaintainable.

#LIL PREPO SOUNDCLOUD HOW TO#

This post is a series of lessons learned about how to engage in this process (and when to decide not to). We have just completed a project that was almost exclusively about tech debt reduction. Topics such as “Tech debt constantly increases development time” and “We have too much tech debt” come up frequently at our team retrospectives. My SoundCloud team, the Content Team, looks after a large number of legacy systems, along with a number of large systems that are difficult to understand and work with. So what can be done about it once it’s there? Background Tight deadlines, changing requirements, scaling issues, poor or short-sighted system designs, knowledge silos, inconsistent coding practices, turnover of key staff - these things all happen and can contribute to tech debt. Almost every company accumulates tech debt as time goes on.

Lil prepo soundcloud