On 28/08/2019 16:37, Chase Peeler wrote:
I'm also not the one that built it on the eggshells - I'm just the one that
is now in charge of developing the system that someone else left sitting
eggshells.
That's a challenge which at some point or another will face all
technical leads.
You have to go to the people making the decisions and say:
"Okay, look, we've got ourselves a problem here. We've dug ourselves
into a hole by cutting corners, building up debt, and we've never made
it a priority to fix it, and now it's causing us problems. It's not one
person's fault, it's something that has collectively developed over
time, but the reality is, the problem is there and needs fixing."
And when the manager asks "What problems?" you say something like:
"The language we use is moving towards a much stricter approach to
handling ambiguous or error prone code. This can only be considered a
good thing, but it is going to mean that a lot of our technical debt is
going to manifest as errors that will stop our site from function..."
Then the manager will go "Can't we just keep using the version we are on?"
You reply:
"We can for a short period, perhaps an extra year or two, but the
reality is that PHP is moving forward, and the current version won't be
supported forever, and even if it were, we would be missing out on major
performance enhancements and new features that could help us to build
new features".
The manager says: "Lay this out to me"
You reply:
"It's like our company car still works, but it no longer tighter meets
emissions standards so they won't let us take it into the city any more"
"Crap", the boss replies "Okay, we had best fix that"
--
Mark Randall
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