On Sat, Mar 16, 2019 at 8:23 AM Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:
A large backlog by itself is not alarming. A growing one for components deployed to WMF sites is. It indicates insufficient attention is given to ongoing maintenance of projects after they are no longer "actively developed", which in turn creates resentment with the reporters.
On Sun, Mar 17, 2019 at 10:22 PM Gergo Tisza gtisza@wikimedia.org wrote:
It really doesn't. The backlog is the contact surface between stuff that exists and stuff that doesn't; all the things we don't have but which seem realistically within reach. As functionality expands, that surface expands too. It is a normal process.
This isn't quite right, it only hold in some kind of simplified and idealized environment.
There are several axis, not only what exist. For example existing and non-existing features might be on the same axis, while it is hard to say that functional vs non-functional code is on the same axis. If you say these two are on the same axis, "stuff that exists", then you end up arguing fixing bugs would be a problem as it expands the feature space, thus will increase the total space and then increase the technical debt.
This will imply that introducing a critical bug will solve the technical debt, as the contact space will collapse. Fairly an acceptable solution! ;D