97 Things Every Programmer Should Know

Chapter 1. Act with Prudence

Seb Rose

Whatever you undertake, act with prudence and consider the consequences.

—Anon

NO MATTER HOW COMFORTABLE A SCHEDULE LOOKS at the beginning of an iteration, you can’t avoid being under pressure some of the time. If you find yourself having to choose between “doing it right” and “doing it quick,” it is often appealing to “do it quick” with the understanding that you’ll come back and fix it later. When you make this promise to yourself, your team, and your customer, you mean it. But all too often, the next iteration brings new problems and you become focused on them. This sort of deferred work is known as technical debt, and it is not your friend. Specifically, Martin Fowler calls this deliberate technical debt in his taxonomy of technical debt,^[1] and it should not be confused with inadvertent technical debt.

Technical debt is like a loan: you benefit from it in the short term, but you have to pay interest on it until it is fully paid off. Shortcuts in the code make it harder to add features or refactor your code. They are breeding grounds for defects and brittle test cases. The longer you leave it, the worse it gets. By the time you get around to undertaking the original fix, there may be a whole stack of not-quite-right design choices layered on top of the original problem, making the code much harder to refactor and correct. In fact, it is often ...