The complexity was accumulating invisibly while the velocity metric said 'you're shipping!'

their productivity is affected by the state of the codebase.

The paradox of information systems[edit] Drummond suggests in her paper in 2008 that computer-based information systems can undermine or even destroy the organisation that they were meant to support, and it is precisely what makes them useful that makes them destructive – a phenomenon encapsulated by the Icarus Paradox.[9] For examples, a defence communication system is designed to improve efficiency by eliminating the need for meetings between military commanders who can now simply use the system to brief one another or answer to a higher authority. However, this new system becomes destructive precisely because the commanders no longer need to meet face-to-face, which consequently weakened mutual trust, thus undermining the organisation.[10] Ultimately, computer-based systems are reliable and efficient only to a point. For more complex tasks, it is recommended for organisations to focus on developing their workforce. A reason for the paradox is that rationality assumes that more is better, but intensification may be counter-productive.[11]

Optimization in this case is nothing crazy, just something I neglected while designing the framework.

this is treated as debt work for of us and that's usually tackled during the first week in the milestone (roughly the first week in the month)

And if they are a technical debt - how do measure up how much you can borrow so you can afford the repayments?

debt ... which is not a straight bad thing but something that could provide some "short term financing" get us to survive the project (how many of us could afford to buy a house without taking out the mortgage?).

But recently I started to think about default values as some sort of a technical debt ... which is not a straight bad thing but something that could provide some "short term financing" get us to survive the project

Customers care more about the value our application adds to their lives than the programming language or framework the application is built with. Visible Technical Debt such as bugs and missing features and poor performance takes precedence over Hidden Technical Debt such as poor test code coverage, modularity or removing dead code

In the real world — the time to pay off technical debt is scarce — in most of the time fueled by the fear of the unknown. The management loves to milk the cow but not to change the litter. The developers on another hand avoid modernizing legacy code — to avoid trouble in case anything breaks.

You are in crossroad to make a big decision: keep increasing the tech debt or start the migration before it is too late.

after nearly 10 years of continuous improvement

The result, all too often, is that we decide (often unconsciously) that the sweeping change just isn't worth it, and leave the undesirable pattern untouched for future versions of ourselves and others to grumble about, while the pattern grows more and more endemic to the code base.

development is hard because you have to preserve the ability to quickly improve the product in the future

TECHNICAL DEBT: A lot of new code is written very very fast, because that’s what the intersection of the current wave of software development (and the angel investor / venture capital model of funding) in Silicon Valley compels people to do. Funders want companies to scale up, quickly, and become monopolies in their space, if they can, through network effects — a system in which the more people use a platform, the more valuable it is. Software engineers do what they can, as fast as they can. Essentially, there is a lot of equivalent of “duct-tape” in the code, holding things together. If done right, that code will eventually be fixed, commented (explanations written up so the next programmer knows what the heck is up) and ported to systems built for the right scale — before there is a crisis. How often does that get done? I wager that many wait to see if the system comes crashing down, necessitating the fix. By then, you are probably too big to go down for too long, so there’s the temptation for more duct tape. And so on.

Instead of thinking of technical debt as yesterday’s work that I failed to do, I think of it as tomorrow’s feature I can have today

the cost of carry