On Technical Debt, Margin Calls, and Ponzi Schemes
<p><em>“When I began the Ponzi scheme I believed it would end shortly and I would be able to extricate myself and my clients from the scheme.” — Bernard Madoff.</em></p>
<p>Software developers can be great with numbers but are usually terrible with finances.</p>
<p>Ward Cunningham coined the term “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">technical debt</a>” to describe a particular category of project issues. Those issues required refactoring to make it easier to work with the codebase but did not affect the final product delivered to the customer.</p>
<p>That was <a href="https://c2.com/doc/oopsla92.html" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">thirty years ago</a>.</p>
<p>It was a period populated with client-server architectures, long before Clouds and the Internet became integral parts of system runtimes.</p>
<p>Fast-forward to modern cloud-based architectures and a poorly organized interface is no longer a bucket of bytes inside an object file; it is a web of calls among micro-services.</p>
<p>The technical debt scope gradually evolved from <em>“internal to the development team”</em> to <em>“not immediately detectable by the customer.”</em></p>
<p>New paradigms demand new metaphors.</p>
<p>And when one needs new debt metaphors, one must turn to the financial markets. In the intervening years since the 90s, the financial industry created mind-bending accounting maneuvers to manage “leverage” — a sophisticated jargon word for risky debt.</p>
<p>This story introduces some of these new forms of financial debt, using them to help us recognize and manage technical debt with new perspectives.</p>
<p>Before getting started, we need a quick recap of a software project’s “investment” stages and how much technical debt lurks in between.</p>
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