Why we all choose to not pay back tech debt

“I’d love to improve this design, but I just haven’t got the time”
“I really want to tidy this up a bit more, but it’s not in the scope of this task”
“We don’t have time to re-think the architecture of this module right now”

Every developer has heard those phrases a hundred times. Hell, every developer has said those phrases a hundred times.
And, as much as we hate to admit it – many times it’s the right thing to do.

I would’ve loved to be payed to deliver elegant, beautiful code, but the reality is, my employer pays me to deliver functionality that is useful for them and for their customers; AKA Value.
Focusing on value delivered to the customer is the biggest emphasis of modern tech businesses, becoming even more prominent following the popularity of Eric Reis’s “The Lean startup”, and the whole “Tech product development” school of thought it inspired.

However, we all (including Reis & friends) also recognize that focusing entirely on customer-facing functionality is a mistake; This is where you get into the oh-so-familiar “tech debt” zone, and then “tech bankruptcy”, leading to the dreaded, and wasteful, admission of failure – the “complete re-write”.

Therefore, we can generally agree that, as software developers, Maintenance, i.e keeping the codebase in a healthy state, is an important part of our job.

But if we all recognize that keeping a healthy codebase is an important part of our job, how do we so often find ourselves with our “value” dials at 100%, but our “maintenance” dials at (nearly) 0%?
We know that maintenance is a must. Our tech lead knows it. Our CTO talks about it, sometimes even the CEO is familiar with the concept of “tech debt” and how terrified the techies are of it.
Yet, on the ground, priorities remain the same. “I don’t have time to fix it right now ever”.

Is there a legitimate reason?

The most popular explanation is the “Big Bad Product manager” theory: I don’t get to do technical maintenance because the evil business person keeps pushing features on me.
I find this explanation insufficient, for two reasons:

Firstly, contrary to how we like to portray them, product managers are reasonable human beings. They, too, know and fear tech debt, and they want to avoid it.
And even if they don’t, keeping the technical side of the business healthy is what your tech leadership team is there for.

Secondly, as we observed above – maintenance is part of your job.

Since when do you have to ask for permission to do your job?

A doctor won’t forgo thorough examinations and tests because “we promised the client we’d be healthy by the end of the quarter”.
A professional contractor won’t start laying down foundations before she’s verified that the ground can sustain the structure she’s building.
So why is it different in software?

A lot of the reason lies in the extreme immaturity of our industry.
We don’t have enough professional standards in place to make code health a non-negotiable part of the process, like safety checks in construction, or sanitization in health services.
(This, in turn, is because haven’t demonstrated enough professional ability to justify such standards; i.e – We took the time to ‘repay tech debt’ in the last project, but it sill turned out crap. So how can we credibly demand to do the same thing in the next project?)

(Of course, this observation will not be news to anyone who listened to what Uncle Bob Martin, and many others, have been saying for years now)

But I believe that this not the whole story – it’s not just that we’re not good (i.e professional) enough to do maintenance properly. Part of the problem is that we don’t even try.
(Remember – it’s “I didn’t do it”, it’s not “I tried, but failed to do it”)

Why don’t we even try to do maintenance?

Let’s consider your typical developer. In any given day, they have the choice to deliver either value or maintenance. We know that they (nearly) always choose the former over the latter. Even though their tech lead, CTO, colleagues, all talk about the horrors of tech debt every single day.
Why is that?

How many times have you (or a colleague) been praised for delivering a feature that was very beneficial to your clients?
Now, compare that to how many times you (or a colleague) have been praised for refactoring, maintaining, or adding technical documentation to your project?

Or, from a different angle – what do you think would be the consequences for you, personally, if you fail to deliver one, out of 100 planned features, to your client?
Compare that to what you think the consequences would be for you, personally, if you fail to improve / maintain the codebase in 100 out of 100 opportunities.

If your workplace is even remotely similar to any workplace I’ve ever seen, you know that delivering excellent maintenance might gain you the gratitude of your coworkers, but delivering features will gain you a promotion.
Which would you pick?

This conclusion is hardly surprising or novel; if there’s one thing I know about market economy (and there is only one thing I actually know), is that people will optimize their behaviour based on the incentives presented to them.
Pay developers by line of code? You get the same functionality written x10 more verbosely.
A bonus for every bug fixed? You get bugs planted in the application, so that they can be fixed later.
No tangible reward at all for maintenance? You get tech debt.

Walk the walk, don’t talk the talk

How can we move the ratio for developers away from 100% value – 0% maintenance?
Simple – managers need to put their money where their mouth is;
Stop talking about wanting to tackle tech debt. Instead, show that you’re willing to pay people to tackle it.
(Balance is important here; while we don’t want the split between value and maintenance to be 100/0, a 50/50 split is also unreasonable)

How about having maintenance-related line items as part of your yearly review process? As part of the developer role specs?
Why not, for every 10 times you ask “how’s such-and-such feature coming along?”, ask “how have you improved the code lately?” once?

Once people understand that there’s an incentive for them to keep the codebase healthy, that their promotion, raise, status within the organization, is affected by it, they will find the time, scope, and energy, to get it done.

(*Huge caveat: To effectively judge whether someone is achieving a certain goal, you need to be able to measure it. Measuring code quality, or the amount of improvement of code quality, is not a solved problem by any means. It’s a subject worthy of a blog post (or book, or academic research) of its own.)

 

What do you think? Does this description map to your own experiences? Is there a legitimate reason why we’re prevented from paying back tech debt that I’ve missed? Or maybe this isn’t actually a problem at all? Let me know below.