Debt Metaphor

Ward Cunningham reflects on the history, motivation and common misunderstanding of the "debt metaphor" as motivation for refactoring.

• Category

  Science & Technology

[surgictube]

poorly written code could be a metaphor for accepting a higher interest rate ;)

[yan nay]

thanks for sharing "WardCunningham"

[Jamal Wills]

As I understand it, you always produce the best code that you can. Over time, more is learned as bugs are fixed and features are added. If you refactor, that improves all of the code quality. If code is never refactored, it begins to resemble a kludgey mess that becomes harder to maintain.

[Tim Ottinger]

Intention was to describe the difference between what the team knows and what the code expresses. In that way, incremental development can create some debt by borrowing against the future.

As he says, though, bad coding is not what was intended and prevents repayment. This is should be required watching for software people.

[Braskus]

Im pretty sure those are DVD's :)

[CroWizCom]

sounds like a challenge between brainstorming and analysis in your interview at artima

[mrkatamura]

What?