We identified at a recent meeting that Launchpad wanted to take some time to retire technical debt and polish off nearly-finished features, which I think is great.
I see Curtis is recently tagging lots of bugs across lp and bzr as being tech-debt. A tag seems potentially quite useful if you want to either: allocate a time slice specifically to fixing these bugs, or to count how many such bugs were fixed or how many remain. However the particular bugs he's tagging seem a bit random to me, and many of them do not seem very important -- like say https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/325883 where abentley specifically says "this is not worth fixing". Curtis says he's doing this based on XXX comments in the code, but to me that seems only very weakly correlated with something being tech debt. One outcome of this could be removing XXX comments that are obsolete, but unless you're already touching that code the payoff seems very small. To me tech debt is something you had to leave unfinished, or something that will get in the way of later changes. <http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TechnicalDebt> It seems like you could only identify them by asking developers to tag bugs that actually annoy them now, or are nagging their conscience, not things they just happened to mention in passing ages ago. Maybe the thing to do is to let developers tag tech debt when they see it, and to just track how many such bugs are actually fixed. -- Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/> _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
