On Mon, Mar 18, 2019 at 10:52 PM bawolff bawolff+wn@gmail.com wrote:
First of all, I want to say that I wholeheartedly agree with everything tgr wrote.
Regarding Pine's question on technical debt.
Technical debt is basically a fancy way of saying something is "icky". It is an inherently subjective notion, and at least for me, how important technical debt is depends a lot on how much my subjective sensibilities on what is icky matches whoever is talking about technical debt.
So yes, I think everyone agrees icky stuff is bad, but sometimes different people have different ideas on what is icky and how much ickiness the icky things contain. Furthermore there is a trap one can fall into of only fixing icky stuff, even if its only slightly icky, which is bad as then you don't actually accomplish anything else. As with everything else in life, moderation is the best policy (imo).
-- Brian
To set degree of ickyness you need a stakeholdergroup, which is often just the sales department. When you neither have a stakeholder group or sales department you tend to end up with ickyness set by the devs, and then features win over bugs. Its just the way things are.
I believe the ickyness felt by the editors must be more visible to the devs, and the actual impact the devs do on bugs to lower the ickyness must be more visible to the editors.