On Sat, Mar 16, 2019 at 8:23 AM Strainu
<strainu10(a)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(a)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