Let's fix that later

It is hard sometimes, hard to resist the urge to postpone finishing or fixing things because other seems more pressing at the time. The decision might seem to be the only thing you could do, but remember that you always impose a risk when doing so. Especially if you leave the issue unattended for a long time, the cost will sneak up upon you.

Picture yourself in your own home.

You are preparing a dinner for you family and friends but you get an important phone call but you are still able to also finish the dinner but now you do not have time to clean up. You spend a great dinner together and everyone is happy. Time to hit the sack, but wait the kitchen is a complete mess, “Nah I’ll do it tomorrow.”

Next morning, good night sleep, time for some nice breakfast, “Maybe I’ll make some scones.” You walk into the kitchen “Yuk what a mess!, I just want some breakfast!”

You decides to make a small breakfast for yourself and the family, you manage to find some clean cutleries and what you need, no problems. But time goes you other important things keeps to get in the way and the kitchen starts to get worse and worse. You notice that you are having difficulties to find the things you need and when you do you need to do minor fixes, such as washing the kitchen knife before you can attend the thing you actually was planning to do. The whole place starts to smell and it is far from inspiring to innovate and create new tasty meals, you take shortcuts.

This is what happens to code if you do not take care of the small things that is needed. The code gets hard to navigate in, it is harder to see what should go where. New ideas gets lost in the murk of bad code. In the State of DevOps report of 2019 they have investigated how technical debt affects productivity and as a consequence software delivery and operational performance and it is visible that technical debt has a significant impact.

So make sure to keep your kitchen clean and well maintained.