Ask HN: Should we call it 'aesthetics' instead of 'technical debt'?
Ask HN: Should we call it 'aesthetics' instead of 'technical debt'?
2 by actinium226 | 3 comments on Hacker News.
There's a couple reasons I don't feel the term 'technical debt' is very good: - There's an implication that it should be 0, but anyone who's ever worked on a large enough project will tell you that any large project will have some technical debt. When you get down to practical implementation there's always tradeoffs that have no single clear answer - There's this dissonance where the things that are called 'technical debt' are potentially serious enough to cause problems, but not serious enough for anyone to actually prioritize dealing with them. Using the description 'aesthetics' makes more sense to me - I think it's inherent that aesthetics has a subjective element and that there's no way to drive it down to 0 or 100 or whatever. - I think it helps with prioritization by setting the right context. "Removing technical debt" doesn't sound like a particularly productive activity, but "improving aesthetics," while clearly not as high priority as, say, "improving functionality," at least carries the connotation that something will get improved as a result of the work, even if it's something not totally tangible. What are HN's thoughts? Are there other words besides aesthetics or technical debt we could/should be using?
2 by actinium226 | 3 comments on Hacker News.
There's a couple reasons I don't feel the term 'technical debt' is very good: - There's an implication that it should be 0, but anyone who's ever worked on a large enough project will tell you that any large project will have some technical debt. When you get down to practical implementation there's always tradeoffs that have no single clear answer - There's this dissonance where the things that are called 'technical debt' are potentially serious enough to cause problems, but not serious enough for anyone to actually prioritize dealing with them. Using the description 'aesthetics' makes more sense to me - I think it's inherent that aesthetics has a subjective element and that there's no way to drive it down to 0 or 100 or whatever. - I think it helps with prioritization by setting the right context. "Removing technical debt" doesn't sound like a particularly productive activity, but "improving aesthetics," while clearly not as high priority as, say, "improving functionality," at least carries the connotation that something will get improved as a result of the work, even if it's something not totally tangible. What are HN's thoughts? Are there other words besides aesthetics or technical debt we could/should be using?
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