Comments by "Scott Franco" (@scottfranco1962) on "Types Of Technical Debt And How To Manage Them" video.

  1. I have taken some heat before when joining projects that were in bad shape and the prevailing opinion was that they wanted to start over. I say, "you'll just make the same mistakes over again". I read a great story about a professor who took a position in a college for the electrical engineering section. The lab for it was in terrible shape, the instruments were all broken. The administrator asked the new professor to make a list of needed equipment and he would see if he could find the money for it. The new professor replied "no, not a problem. We will use what we have". The administrator left, stunned. The new professor started his classes and took the new students out to the lab. Over a course of months, they took apart the broken equipment, got schematics for them, and went over what was wrong with each instrument as a group project. Slowly but surely, they got most of it working again. The students that did this because some of the best engineers the school had seen. The moral of the story is applicable to software rewrites. The team that abandons the software and starts over does not learn anything from the existing software, even if they didn't write it. They create a new big mess to replace the old big mess. Contrast that with a team that is forced to refactor the code. They learn the mistakes of the code, how to fix it, and, perhaps more importantly of all, become experts at refactoring code. In the last 2 years, I instituted a goal for myself that I would track down even "insignificant" problems in my code, and go after the hardest problems first. In that time I have been amazed at how often a "trivial" problem turned out to illustrate a deep and serious error in the code. Similarly, I have been amazed at how solving hard problems first makes the rest of the code go that much easier. I have always been a fan of continuous integration without calling it that. I simply always suspected that the longer it took to remerge a branch in the code, the longer it would take to reintegrate it, vs. small changes and improvements taking a day or so. I can't take credit for this realization. Too many times I have been assigned to merge projects that were complete messes because of the long span of branch development. As the old saw goes, the better you perform such tasks the more of it you will get, especially if others show no competence in it.
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