An enterprise-wide definition of technical debt is essential because effective technical debt management requires cooperation from almost everyone. Absent a shared definition of technical debt, controversy can develop, especially among those who have previously encountered the concept—namely, among technologists. Policymakers can make invaluable contributions to the design of the cultural transformation that will enable control of technical debt.
A physical expression of shared commitment. Effective management of technical debt requires both a shared understanding of what it is and a shared commitment to do what’s required to get control of it.
Li et al. [Li 2015] found that defining what is and what is not technical debt remains a question at issue in the software engineering literature. Even if we restrict the discussion to software constructed in-house, opinions about what constitutes technical debt do differ. The authors found that in the literature of technical debt, “The term ‘debt’ has been used in different ways by different people, which leads to ambiguous interpretation of the term.”
This finding is perhaps the most significant for policymakers, because it suggests that implementing a technical debt management regime will require forging an organizational consensus about the meaning of the term technical debt. The people of most organizations come from a broad array of different backgrounds. Some have little knowledge of technical debt, and therefore have no preconceptions. But those who are aware of the issue, who are mainly technologists and their managers, probably interpret the term technical debtin a variety of ways. Because some of those who do have awareness of the term are likely to have strong opinions about its meaning, one can anticipate a need to resolve these differences of opinion early in the effort to gain control of technical debt.
Some technical terms, like RAID,byte, compiler, and kilowatt,have standard definitions that are widely accepted. Although the term technical debthas found wide use, there is no standard definition for it. What some people categorize as technical debt, others do not. Those who are accustomed to working with terms that have precise, widely accepted definitions might tend to assume that the term technical debtdoes have (or should have) one as well. This assumption can create some difficulty for people who do not realize that others might not share their views as to the definition of the term.
Policymakers must be aware that there is a lack of consensus about the definition of technical debt. Our definition, crafted specially for the use of policymakers, might seem unusually broad to technologists and engineers. For that reason alone, it’s advisable to become familiar with the various ways the term is used by technologists, because understanding their perspective is essential to formulating sound policy deserving of their respect.
References
[Li 2015] Zengyang Li, Paris Avgeriou, and Peng Liang. “A systematic mapping study on technical debt and its management,” Journal of Systems and Software 101, 193-220, 2015.
Tension between policymakers and technologists, which can manifest as misalignment of their respective priorities, is a significant contributor to uncontrolled growth of technical debt. In this thread I explore sources of this tension and introduce concepts that can assist policymakers and technologists in their efforts to control the growth of technical debt.
Effective, sustainable control of technical debt is the objective of technical debt management policy. In an enterprise that has achieved this objective, technical debt serves as a strategic tool that assists in attaining and maintaining market leadership. In such an organization, technical debt does exist, and some legacy technical debt might remain in place, but technical debt growth is managed strategically, if growth occurs at all. Any technical debt that carries significant MICs, and which compromises productivity and enterprise agility, is addressed and retired with appropriate priority. In short, technical debt is addressed not solely as a technological issue, but as a component of business strategy.
Raindrops on a grapevine. We often think of tension as a negative, destructive force. But tension—in the case of raindrops, surface tension—is what holds a raindrop together. Tension gives the raindrop structure and integrity. The tension between technologists and policymakers can also be constructive. It can ensure that the enterprise manages its technical debt in ways that balance the political imperatives of both technology and strategic health.
This stance is at odds with the historical position most enterprises have adopted vis-à-vis technical debt. Historically, technical debt has been seen as a technical problem, if it has been recognized at all. Most enterprises have left the management of technical debt to the technologists. Frequently, then, the policymaker who enters the discussion about technical debt might be seen by technologists as an interloper, arriving late to the discussion, or as a less-than-knowledgeable invader attempting to seize control of a piece of the technologists’ domain. Tensions can arise between policymakers and technologists. Such tensions complicate the problem of managing technical debt.
One possible source of this tension is revealed in a study of the literature of technical debt, which is evolving so rapidly that it has itself become a focus for research. Li et al. [Li 2015] have produced a review of the software engineering technical debt literature, from which we can extract insights useful to policymakers. Although they studied only the literature relating to technical debt in software engineering, their conclusions are, at least in part, applicable to any field in which the components of the finished product are executed within software tools before being committed to operational form. This covers a wide array of knowledge-intensive endeavors, including mechanical system design, electronic design, framing of legislation, process design, architecture, and even book authorship.
In this thread, I explore the sources of the tension between the modern reality of technical debt as an enterprise issue, and the historical situation of technical debt as a technological issue. This can serve as a guide for policymakers in reframing technical debt from a technological issue dependent for resolution on enterprise resources, to an enterprise issue dependent for resolution on technological resources.
References
[Li 2015] Zengyang Li, Paris Avgeriou, and Peng Liang. “A systematic mapping study on technical debt and its management,” Journal of Systems and Software 101, 193-220, 2015.
Although creating and deploying policies to manage technical debt is a necessary step, it isn’t sufficient for achieving control in every case. Even if training and communication programs are effective, the possibility of intentional circumvention of technical debt management policy remains. Malfeasance can lead to incurring new technical debt by circumventing any policy. And malfeasance can be an obstacle to retiring—or even identifying—existing technical debt. Moreover, indirect effects of forms of malfeasance seemingly unrelated to technical debt can nevertheless incur technical debt or extend the lifetime of existing technical debt.
Examples of malfeasance as a source of technical debt
Elizabeth Holmes Backstage at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2014. She is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Theranos, a startup that grew to a total valuation of $9 billion in 2015, and has since dramatically declined in value, now on the edge of its second bankruptcy. Theranos, through Holmes, claimed to have developed a technology that enabled blood testing with small amounts of blood—0.1% to 1% of the amount of blood required by conventional blood testing technologies. These claims proved false. After a series of collisions with U.S. government agencies, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued Holmes and Theranos. In March 2018, a settlement was reached in which Holmes accepted severe financial penalties, loss of voting control of Theranos, and a ban from serving as an officer or director of any public company for ten years. Photo (cc) Max Morse for TechCrunch.
Consider an example from software engineering. To save time, an engineer might intentionally choose to use a deprecated approach. When the malfeasance is discovered, one question naturally arises: in what other places and on what other projects has this individual (or other individuals) been making such choices? In a conventional approach to controlling this form of technical debt, we might be concerned only with the engineer’s current assignment. But a more comprehensive investigation might uncover a trail of technical debt artifacts in the engineer’s previous assignments.
Allman relates a hardware-oriented example [Allman 2012]. He describes an incident involving the University of California at Berkeley’s CalMail system, which failed catastrophically in November 2011, when one disk in a RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) failed due to deferred maintenance. Allman regards this incident as traceable to the technical debt consisting of the deferred RAID maintenance. While this particular case isn’t an example of malfeasance, it’s reasonable to suppose that decisions to defer technical maintenance on complex systems frequently are arguably negligent.
History provides us with many clear examples of malfeasance leading to technical debt indirectly. Consider the Brooklyn Bridge. Many of the suspension cables of the bridge contain substandard steel wire, which was provided to the bridge constructors by an unscrupulous manufacturer. When the bridge engineer discovered the malfeasance, he recognized that the faulty wire that had already been installed could not be removed, or even inspected. So he compensated for the faulty wire by adding additional strands to the affected cables. For more, see “Non-technical precursors of non-strategic technical debt.”
What kinds of malfeasance deserve special attention and why
Malfeasance that leads to incurring technical debt or which extends the life of existing technical debt has the potential to expose the enterprise to uncontrolled increases in operating expenses and unknown obstacles to revenue generation. The upward pressures on operating expenses derive from the MICs associated with technical debt. Although MICs can include obstacles to revenue generation, considering these obstacles separately helps to clarify of the effects of malfeasance.
Malfeasance deserves special attention because the financial harm to the enterprise can dramatically exceed the financial benefit the malfeasance confers on its perpetrators. This property of technical-debt-related malfeasance is what makes its correction, detection, and prevention so important.
For example, when hiring engineers, some candidates claim to have capabilities and experience that they actually don’t have. Once they’re on board, they expose the enterprise to the risk of technical debt creation through substandard work that can escape notice for indefinite periods. The malfeasance here consists of the candidate’s misrepresentation of his or her capabilities. Although the candidate, once hired, does receive some benefit arising from the malfeasance, the harm to the enterprise can exceed that benefit by orders of magnitude.
As a second example, consider the behavior of organizational psychopaths [Babiak 2007] [Morse 2004]. Organizational psychopathy can be a dominant contributing factor to technical debt formation when the primary beneficiary of a proposed strategy is the decision-maker or the advocate who takes credit for the short term effects of the decision, and when he or she intends knowingly to move on to a new position or to employment elsewhere before the true long term cost of the technical debt becomes evident. This behavior is malfeasance of the highest order. And although it’s rare, its impact can be severe. For more, see “Organizational psychopathy: career advancement by surfing the debt tsunami.”
What’s required to control malfeasance
When a particular kind of malfeasance can incur technical debt or extend the life of existing technical debt, it merits special attention. Examples like those above suggest three attributes that technical debt management programs must have if they are to deal effectively with malfeasance.
Corrective measures
Corrective measures can be undertaken in a straightforward manner when inadvertent policy violations occur. For example, unexpected difficulties in setting priorities for technical debt retirement efforts might be the result of individual performance metrics that conflict with the technical debt control program. Such conflicts can be inadvertent and can be resolved collaboratively.
But with regard to malfeasance, difficulties arise when policy violations are discovered or reported. When the violations are intentional, corrective action usually entails investigation of the means by which the infraction was achieved, and the means by which it was concealed. When these activities involve many individuals attached to multiple business units, some means of allocating the cost of corrective action might be needed. Allocating the cost of corrections can also be difficult when one party has reaped extraordinary benefits by taking steps that led to incurring significant technical debt. In some cases, corrective measures might include punitive actions directed at individuals.
Detection measures
When intentional violations are covert, or those who committed the violations claim that they’re unintentional, investigation is necessary to determine whether or not a pattern of violations exists. Technical debt forensic activities require resources, including rigorous audits and robust record-keeping regarding the decisions that led to the formation or persistence of technical debt. Automated detection techniques might be necessary to control the cost of detection efforts, and to ensure reliable detection.
Preventative measures
Successful prevention of policy violations requires education, communication, and effective enforcement. The basis of effective policy violation prevention programs includes widespread understanding of the technical debt concept and the technical debt management policies, and the certainty of discovery of intentional infractions. These factors require commitment and continuing investment.
Policy frameworks are at risk of depressed effectiveness if they pay too little attention to malfeasance and other forms of misconduct. Such misbehavior deserves special attention because it’s often accompanied both by attempts to conceal any resulting technical debt, and attempts to mislead investigators and managers about its existence. These situations do arise, though rarely, and when they do, they must be addressed in policy terms.
References
[Allman 2012] Eric Allman. “Managing Technical Debt: Shortcuts that save money and time today can cost you down the road,” ACM Queue, 10:3, March 23, 2012.
[Li 2015] Zengyang Li, Paris Avgeriou, and Peng Liang. “A systematic mapping study on technical debt and its management,” Journal of Systems and Software 101, 193-220, 2015.
Cultural debt can be expensive because, like technical debt, it can incur ongoing metaphorical interest charges. Schein defines organizational culture as “…a pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration…” [Schein 2016]. Following the concept of technical debt, we can regard as cultural debt the subset of shared basic assumptions comprising enterprise culture that are no longer fitting for enterprise realities. We can also include as cultural debt any assumptions that ought to be shared, but which are missing or are only partially shared. And we can include shared assumptions that conflict with each other and need to be resolved.
An example of cultural debt: the term “IT”
A tape measure calibrated in both feet/inches and meters/centimeters. The need to possess tools that serve both measurement systems can be viewed as the metaphorical interest charges on a technical debt resulting from the failure to retire the older “English” system. But from another perspective, the debt involved is actually cultural. Retiring the older system would truly involve a cultural shift.
For most modern enterprises, one element of cultural debt is the very term IT itself — information technology. Coined in 1958 by Leavitt and Whisler [Leavitt 1958], the term was apt up to as recently as 20 years ago, when the role of IT was primarily management, storage, retrieval, manipulation, and presentation of data — information — by technological means. Although those functions remain relevant, the responsibilities of IT have expanded dramatically since 1958. In many organizations, IT is now responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining the communication infrastructure, including Internet access, personal computers, networking, Web presence, telephones, video conferencing equipment, and television.
In modern organizations in which communication plays a critical and strategic role, an essential element for success is a clear understanding of what IT does and what it contributes. To regard IT as the “information technology” function of the enterprise is, therefore, to risk overlooking and undervaluing these more recently acquired responsibilities. And since the IT function is no longer solely responsible for enterprise information, using the name “IT” or the term information technology risks overvaluing the role of the IT organization relative to information management, while undervaluing its role relative to communications.
In Schein’s culture framework, the term IT reflects a shared assumption about the focus and span of the IT function. That assumption is that IT is responsible for information—an assumption that is no longer well aligned to the reality of the role of IT. We can regard this misalignment as a cultural debt.
The consequences of this particular kind of cultural debt can be severe. For instance, IT is typically responsible for selecting and configuring software for personal computers (PCs) — both desktop and laptop. This responsibility can arise as a consequence of two shared assumptions. First, that computers process information, and second, that IT is responsible for technology-based information processing. The result is that decisions about what many regard as a “personal” computer are not in the control of the person who uses the computer. This conflict in shared assumptions can lead to conflict between PC users and IT, when the IT decision is at variance with their personal preferences.
Worse, a centralized decision process for determining PC configurations is likely to produce outcomes less suitable than would a process more focused at the individual level, which only adds to the frustrations of PC users, and exacerbates the conflict between them and IT. To mitigate the risk that some PC users might try to circumvent IT policy, IT must deploy technology to ensure adherence to their policies. We can regard all of that activity, on the part of both IT and the PC users, as metaphorical interest charges on cultural debt.
An example of retiring cultural debt
In 1987, Edward Yourdon founded a magazine then known as American Programmer. In 1990, Cutter Information Corporation purchased the rights to American Programmer and created Cutter IT Journal, which name includes the term IT. At the time IT was more suitable than the term programmer. As noted above, the term IT, while once useful and apt, is now outmoded at best and often misleading. Just as the functional name IT in organizations constitutes cultural debt, so it does in the name of a journal.
So in the autumn of 2016, Cutter IT Journal retired the cultural debt in its name, and became Cutter Business Technology Journal. Journals rarely change their names. When they do, the impact of the journal is temporarily depressed because of the split of citations between the former title and the new title for two years or so [Tempest 2005]. But as research fields change, their journals must keep pace. Evidently Cutter felt a significant need to retire its cultural debt — significant enough to justify a temporary effect on impact.
What about cultural debt retirement in companies?
Difficulties associated with retiring cultural debt in companies depend strongly on both the nature of the culture and the nature of the debt. To provide insight into the issues that can arise, let’s continue with our exploration of the term IT and its cultural implications.
In many organizations, IT reports to an enterprise Chief Information Officer (CIO). Associated with this official’s title are some of the same cultural debts we find associated with the name of the IT organization. First, within their organizations, CIOs aren’t the only officers with information management responsibility. Second, many CIOs have responsibilities that extend beyond information management, to include, for example, the communication infrastructure. And unlike other peer titles such as CEO, CFO, CMO, and COO, the CIO title evokes separation from business-oriented decisions. That separation contributes to a cultural wall between “IT” and “the business.”
When cultures view IT as an information-centric service organization, a remnant perhaps of the middle or late 20th century, they tend to regard IT as a source of expense to be minimized, rather than as a strategic partner [Ross 2000]. Trends toward strategic acceptance of IT are nevertheless favorable, with room for improvement, according to recent surveys of CIOs [CIO 2018], probably because of reality.
The reality is that business technology must contribute to formulation and implementation of enterprise strategy. To the extent that CIOs and their organizations are viewed as separate from “the business,” their ability to help shape enterprise strategy is limited. This situation subjects CIOs to cultural assumptions about their responsibilities that in some instances conflict with each other, or with enterprise reality. That’s a significant source of the metaphorical interest charges on the cultural debt.
One possible way to retire this debt might entail retitling Chief Information Officer to Chief Business Technology Officer (CBTO). That’s precisely what happened at Forrester Research in 2011 [Plant 2014].
Unfortunately, the name CBTO conflicts with the three-word pattern of enterprise officer titles (C*O), which might create an urge to name the office Chief Technology Officer (CTO). But that role usually has responsibility for the functions that create technological products or services. Thus, for many organizations, to create a CBTO where there is already a CTO might create further sources of conflict. Using the CTO designation for the CBTO is probably impractical.
But we must find some way to retire this particular cultural debt, because it is such an effective generator of technical debt. CBTO seems to be the best available path.
References
[Allman 2012] Eric Allman. “Managing Technical Debt: Shortcuts that save money and time today can cost you down the road,” ACM Queue, 10:3, March 23, 2012.
[Li 2015] Zengyang Li, Paris Avgeriou, and Peng Liang. “A systematic mapping study on technical debt and its management,” Journal of Systems and Software 101, 193-220, 2015.
[Ross 2000] Jeanne W. Ross and David F. Feeny. “The Evolving Role of the CIO,” in Framing the Domains of IS Management Research: Glimpsing the Future through the Past, edited by Robert W. Zmud. Pinnaflex, 2000.
In the United States, the Broken Windows theory of crime control first appeared in the public conversation in 1982, when Kelling and Wilson described it in The Atlantic (then known as The Atlantic Monthly) [Kelling 1982]. Briefly, the theory suggests that in urban environments, by applying police resources to preventing small crimes such as vandalism, public drinking, and toll jumping, one can prevent serious crime and create an atmosphere of order and lawfulness. Gladwell popularized the idea in his explosive best seller The Tipping Point [Gladwell 2000].
Broken windows in an old abandoned factory. To work in an environment dominated by properties like this must certainly be demoralizing. But whether existing technical debt actually causes people to make choices that incur new technical debt is another question. At this point, it’s an open question.
In the year before Gladwell’s work appeared, Hunt and Thomas incorporated the Broken Windows theory into their work, The Pragmatic Programmer, suggesting it as a justification for the importance of retiring technical debt immediately upon discovering it [Hunt 1999]. Briefly, the theory as applied to technical debt in software is that tolerating low quality and technical debt in a given asset encourages further degradation of quality and incurring additional technical debt. Within the software community, the Broken Windows theory of managing technical debt is widely accepted [Note a].
However, between Kelling’s work in 1982 and the work of Hunt and Thomas in 1999, criminologists and sociologists had become skeptical of the Broken Windows theory as applied to crime prevention. As far back as 1998, investigations had begun to cast doubt on the Broken Windows theory [Harcourt 1998]. In 2006, Eck and Maguire assembled a review of the escalating controversy [Eck 2006]. Research by O’Brien, Sampson, and Winship, based on “big data” analyses, failed to produce evidence of validity of the Broken Windows theory beyond a weak positive correlation between social orderliness and lawful behavior [O’Brien 2015]. Indeed, their research instead showed a very strong positive correlation between private violent behavior and major crimes. Others have noted that what appeared to be positive results for the application of the Broken Windows approach to crime prevention in the 1990s was actually explainable by other phenomena [Note b].
Social scientists and criminologists have taken these findings seriously enough to have founded the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University, which maintains an evidence-based policing matrix to assist law enforcement organizations in evaluating the validity of claims about the efficacy of specific tactics and strategies, such as the Broken Windows theory. (See their review of Broken Windows Policing.)
But even as doubts developed about the efficacy of Broken Windows policing for crime prevention, Broken Windows continued to find adherents relative to managing technical debt in software assets. The software engineering community thus finds itself, perhaps, in the same position with respect to Broken Windows as it is with respect to the Tragedy of the Commons. Broken Windows and the Tragedy of the Commons are both fine analogies, but the fields that originated them now have superior ways of understanding the phenomena in question.
Maybe it’s time for the engineering community to re-examine Broken Windows as it pertains to technological asset quality and technical debt. At this time, the author is aware only of anecdotal support for the Broken Windows theory of technical debt management. Perhaps the Broken Windows theory will work better in engineering than it did in social science or criminology, but do you want to bet your company on that?
References
[Allman 2012] Eric Allman. “Managing Technical Debt: Shortcuts that save money and time today can cost you down the road,” ACM Queue, 10:3, March 23, 2012.
[Eck 2006] J. Eck and E.R. Maguire. “Have Changes in Policing Reduced Violent Crime? An Assessment of the Evidence,” in Blumstein, Alfred, and Joel Wallman, eds. The Crime Drop in America, Revised Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 207-265.
[Harcourt 1998] Bernard E. Harcourt. “Reflecting on the Subject: A Critique of the Social Influence Conception of Deterrence, the Broken Windows Theory, and Order-Maintenance Policing New York Style,” 97 Michigan Law Review 291, 1998.
[Li 2015] Zengyang Li, Paris Avgeriou, and Peng Liang. “A systematic mapping study on technical debt and its management,” Journal of Systems and Software 101, 193-220, 2015.
[Pietola 2012] Mikko Pietola. “Technical Excellence In Agile Software Projects,” Master’s Thesis, Information Technology, Oulu University of Applied Sciences, 2012.
[Venners 2003] Bill Venners. “Don’t Live with Broken Windows: A Conversation with Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, Part I,” blog at Artima.com, March 3, 2003.
[Note b] Articles and blog entries questioning the validity of the Broken Windows theory of crime prevention:
[Nuwer 2013] Rachel Nuwer. “Sorry, Malcolm Gladwell: NYC’s Drop in Crime Not Due to Broken Window Theory,” SmartNews blog at smithsonian.com, February 6, 2013.
[Harcourt 2006a] Bernard E. Harcourt. “Bratton's ‘broken windows’:No matter what you’ve heard, the chief’s policing method wastes precious funds,” Los Angeles Times, April 20, 2006.
[Harcourt 2006b] Bernard E. Harcourt and Jens Ludwig. “Broken Windows: New Evidence From New York City and a Five-City Social Experiment,” University of Chicago Law Review, Vol. 73, 2006.
[Ross 2000] Jeanne W. Ross and David F. Feeny. “The Evolving Role of the CIO,” in Framing the Domains of IS Management Research: Glimpsing the Future through the Past, edited by Robert W. Zmud. Pinnaflex, 2000.
Many believe that technical debt arises, in part, because of a phenomenon known as the Tragedy of the Commons [Hardin 1968], which is an allegory that purports to demonstrate that the user communities associated with shared resources inevitably degrade those resources until they’re depleted. The allegory supposedly supports the thesis that only monocratic control of an asset can provide the strict regulation that prevents its inevitable degradation as a result of shared use. Advocates of this approach to limiting the degradation arising from the expansion of technical debt hold that assigning sole ownership of resources, resource by resource, is the only effective method of controlling technical debt.
A map of the Boston Common and Public Garden, circa 1890. By that time it was basically a park. But as late as 1830 it was still being used as a cow pasture. They didn’t have refrigeration at the home scale then, except by ice blocks, and the best way to get fresh dairy products was to have a cow. In the very early days, 1633-1640, anyone could graze on the Common, but as wealthy people acquired more animals, the common became overgrazed, and a 70-cow limit was imposed. That limit stood until 1830. It’s an example of a method for managing a shared resource. This map is from an atlas of Boston published by G.W. Bromley & Co.,, courtesy Wikimedia CommonsThe resources in question here are the assets that tend to accumulate, or are accumulating, or have accumulated, technical debt. Adherents of the theory would impose order by dividing each technological asset into one or more sectors, sometimes called development silos, with only one organizational unit designated as the “owner,” empowered to develop, maintain, or extend that sector [Bossavit 2013] [Morris 2012]. Irreconcilable disagreements about the direction or purpose of a particular sector of the asset presumably would be resolved by branching.
Ironically, such an approach would — and demonstrably does — produce significant technical debt in the form of duplication of artifacts and services. Moreover, it elevates costs relative to a truly shared asset, by reducing sharing, and increasing the need for testing. We can regard such an approach as dysfunctional conflict avoidance [Brenner 2016b].
Although at one time the Tragedy of the Commons was regarded as a universally valid concept in political economics, subsequent research has demonstrated that the principle it describes is not generally applicable. Hardin first described the Tragedy of the Commons in 1968, in the form of an allegory [Hardin 1968]. In his words:
Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.
As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?”
Hardin then explains that each herdsman is compelled by the logic of the situation to exploit the shared resource to the maximum. Each herdsman puts his own interests ahead of the welfare of the resource.
And so it goes, supposedly, with technical debt. Each user of the shared asset expends resources on development, maintenance, and enhancement only to the extent that the expenditure is justified by immediate need. Retiring any legacy technical debt, or any technical debt accumulated in the course of meeting those immediate needs, is regarded as low priority. Because resources for debt retirement are rarely if ever sufficient to meet the need, technical debt grows inexorably. Eventually, the shared asset becomes unmaintainable and must be abandoned.
However, careful research shows that Hardin’s Commons allegory is not applicable to every situation involving shared resources. That same research casts doubt on the validity of the assertion that development silos are necessary in any approach to technical debt management.
Certainly there are many examples of shared resources degrading along the lines outlined by Hardin, such as the collapse of the Northwest Atlantic cod fishery [Frank 2005], but many counterexamples exist. Research by the late political economist Elinor Ostrom uncovered numerous examples of complex social schemes for maintaining common resources efficiently and sustainably [Ostrom 2009] [Ostrom 1990]. Ostrom studied and reported on systems that successfully managed shared resources over long terms — in some cases, centuries. For this work, she received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009.
As Ostrom’s research demonstrated, the problem with Hardin’s allegory is that it applies only to shared resources that are open to use by all without regulation. The misapplication of the Tragedy of the Commons is clearly described in a World Bank Discussion Paper by Bromley and Cernea [Bromley 1989]:
For some time now, Hardin’s allegory of the “tragedy” has had remarkable currency among researchers and development practitioners. Not only has it become the dominant paradigm within which social scientists assess natural resource issues, but it appears explicitly and implicitly in the formulation of many programs and projects and in other beliefs and prejudices derived from it. Unfortunately, its power as a metaphor is not matched by its capacity for aiding our understanding of resource management regimes. By confusing an open access regime (a free-for-all) with a common property regime (in which group size and behavioral rules are specified) the metaphor denies the very possibility for resource users to act together and institute checks and balances, rules and sanctions, for their own interaction within a given environment.
Hardin himself later published an extension of the allegory that clarified the role of regulation [Hardin 1998], as had been observed much earlier by Lloyd [Lloyd 1833].
The real tragedy for technology managers would be their failure to learn from the past errors of social scientists and political economists, and to then repeat, in the context of technical debt management, this now well-understood confusion about the domain of applicability of Hardin’s allegory.
We can apply Ostrom’s result to the problem of managing technical debt if we identify the technical asset as the shared resource, and identify as the community exploiting the resource the stakeholders who employ, develop, maintain, cyber-defend, or extend that technical asset. Ostrom’s results tell us that sustainable exploitation is possible only if the community devises rules, customs, and sanctions that manage the technical debt. Kim and Wood [Kim 2011] provide an analysis that explains how regulation can avert depletion scenarios. Technology managers can apply these lessons to the problem of managing technical debt.
The Tragedy of the Commons is a distraction because technical debt isn’t an inevitable result of sharing assets when the organization adheres to a Principle of Sustainability. That principle is that sustainability is possible only if the community sharing the asset devises customs, rules, and sanctions that effectively control the level of technical debt. You just can’t have a free-for-all unregulated regime, as most organizations now do. Management and practitioners must collaborate to devise the customs, rules, and sanctions for managing the asset. And regular updating is probably necessary. Leadership in devising those customs, rules, and sanctions is a job for the policymaker.
References
[Allman 2012] Eric Allman. “Managing Technical Debt: Shortcuts that save money and time today can cost you down the road,” ACM Queue, 10:3, March 23, 2012.
[Bossavit 2013] Laurent Bossavit (@Morendil), “Zero Code Ownership will lead to a tragedy-of-the-commons situation, where everybody bemoans how ‘technical debt’ makes their job suck.”, a tweet published April 20, 2013.
[Bromley 1989] Daniel W. Bromley and Michael M. Cernea. “The Management of Common Property Natural Resources: Some Conceptual and Operational Fallacies.” World Bank Discussion Paper WDP-57. 1989.
[Eck 2006] J. Eck and E.R. Maguire. “Have Changes in Policing Reduced Violent Crime? An Assessment of the Evidence,” in Blumstein, Alfred, and Joel Wallman, eds. The Crime Drop in America, Revised Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 207-265.
[Frank 2005] Frank, Kenneth T., Brian Petrie, Jae S. Choi, William C. Leggett. "Trophic Cascades in a Formerly Cod-Dominated Ecosystem." Science. 308 (5728): 1621–1623. June 10, 2005.
[Harcourt 1998] Bernard E. Harcourt. “Reflecting on the Subject: A Critique of the Social Influence Conception of Deterrence, the Broken Windows Theory, and Order-Maintenance Policing New York Style,” 97 Michigan Law Review 291, 1998.
[Kim 2011] Daniel H. Kim and Virginia Anderson. Systems Archetype Basics: From Story to Structure, Waltham, Massachusetts: Pegasus Communications, Inc., 2011
[Li 2015] Zengyang Li, Paris Avgeriou, and Peng Liang. “A systematic mapping study on technical debt and its management,” Journal of Systems and Software 101, 193-220, 2015.
[Morris 2012] Ben Morris. “How to manage down the payments on your technical debt,” Ben Morris Software Architecture blog, September 3, 2012.
Available here; Retrieved December 30, 2016. This blog entry contains an assertion that controlling formation of new technical debt requires only “diligence, ownership and governance.”
[Pietola 2012] Mikko Pietola. “Technical Excellence In Agile Software Projects,” Master’s Thesis, Information Technology, Oulu University of Applied Sciences, 2012.
[Venners 2003] Bill Venners. “Don’t Live with Broken Windows: A Conversation with Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, Part I,” blog at Artima.com, March 3, 2003.
[Note b] Articles and blog entries questioning the validity of the Broken Windows theory of crime prevention:
[Nuwer 2013] Rachel Nuwer. “Sorry, Malcolm Gladwell: NYC’s Drop in Crime Not Due to Broken Window Theory,” SmartNews blog at smithsonian.com, February 6, 2013.
[Harcourt 2006a] Bernard E. Harcourt. “Bratton's ‘broken windows’:No matter what you’ve heard, the chief’s policing method wastes precious funds,” Los Angeles Times, April 20, 2006.
[Harcourt 2006b] Bernard E. Harcourt and Jens Ludwig. “Broken Windows: New Evidence From New York City and a Five-City Social Experiment,” University of Chicago Law Review, Vol. 73, 2006.
[Ross 2000] Jeanne W. Ross and David F. Feeny. “The Evolving Role of the CIO,” in Framing the Domains of IS Management Research: Glimpsing the Future through the Past, edited by Robert W. Zmud. Pinnaflex, 2000.
During policy debates, some decision-makers and some advocates take positions that offer short-term advantages to the enterprise at the expense of incurring heavy burdens of new technical debt or allowing legacy technical debt to remain in place. Some of these decisions can be strategic, and they can benefit the enterprise. But organizational psychopathy can be the dominant contributing factor when the primary beneficiary of the strategy is the decision-maker or the advocate, and when he or she intends knowingly to move on to a new position or to employment elsewhere before the true cost of the technical debt becomes evident.
The aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, 26 December 2004. Shown is what remained of Meulaboh, Sumatra, Indonesia, after it was hit by the tsunami. The photo was taken on January 10. At the lower left is a Landing Craft Air Cushion (LCAC) hovercraft vehicle, assigned to USS Bonhomme Richard, delivering supplies. LCACs are capable of transporting more supplies than helicopters in a single trip. The technical debt devastation left behind after an organizational psychopath moves on to further conquests can be just as overwhelming as the physical devastation left behind after a tsunami. Photo by U.S. Navy courtesy Wikimedia Commons.Such decisions can be counterproductive for the enterprise in the long term. But the decision-maker or advocate nevertheless favors the decision, because he or she plans to take credit for the short-term benefits, and then move on to a new career position elsewhere to escape the technical debt problems created by the decision. In effect, the decision-maker or advocate plans to “surf the debt tsunami.”
People who adopt strategies of this kind might be following the pattern of organizational psychopathy [Babiak 2007] [Morse 2004]. Organizational psychopaths compulsively seek power and control over others. They use a vast array of tactics, but the tactic of greatest relevance to this discussion is the use of enterprise resources to advance the psychopath’s career. Technical debt provides a mechanism for borrowing future resources to enhance present performance, thus advancing the career of the psychopath. It’s especially attractive to the psychopath because the harmful consequences of technical debt can remain hidden until the psychopath has long ago moved on.
Psychopaths are better equipped than most to execute such strategies, because they can be exceedingly charming, intelligent, and charismatic. Because they are adept at deception, they are willing to conceal the truth about the technical debt they create, misrepresenting its costs and consequences, or concealing it altogether. Most important, organizational psychopaths seem to lack the internal regulators of conscience and compunction that limit the actions of non-psychopaths. For example, in a debate about a specific technical decision, the psychopath is willing to use any tools available to win the point, including using deception to destroy the career of anyone who challenges the psychopath’s position.
Babiak and Hare estimate that the incidence of psychopathy in senior positions in business is about 3-4% — between 1/30 and 1/25. However, I’m unaware of any studies of the strategic use of technical debt by these individuals. It’s reasonable to suppose that technical debt has been so employed, but the significance of this phenomenon is unknown. Serious investigation is in order.
References
[Allman 2012] Eric Allman. “Managing Technical Debt: Shortcuts that save money and time today can cost you down the road,” ACM Queue, 10:3, March 23, 2012.
[Bossavit 2013] Laurent Bossavit (@Morendil), “Zero Code Ownership will lead to a tragedy-of-the-commons situation, where everybody bemoans how ‘technical debt’ makes their job suck.”, a tweet published April 20, 2013.
[Bromley 1989] Daniel W. Bromley and Michael M. Cernea. “The Management of Common Property Natural Resources: Some Conceptual and Operational Fallacies.” World Bank Discussion Paper WDP-57. 1989.
[Eck 2006] J. Eck and E.R. Maguire. “Have Changes in Policing Reduced Violent Crime? An Assessment of the Evidence,” in Blumstein, Alfred, and Joel Wallman, eds. The Crime Drop in America, Revised Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 207-265.
[Frank 2005] Frank, Kenneth T., Brian Petrie, Jae S. Choi, William C. Leggett. "Trophic Cascades in a Formerly Cod-Dominated Ecosystem." Science. 308 (5728): 1621–1623. June 10, 2005.
[Harcourt 1998] Bernard E. Harcourt. “Reflecting on the Subject: A Critique of the Social Influence Conception of Deterrence, the Broken Windows Theory, and Order-Maintenance Policing New York Style,” 97 Michigan Law Review 291, 1998.
[Kim 2011] Daniel H. Kim and Virginia Anderson. Systems Archetype Basics: From Story to Structure, Waltham, Massachusetts: Pegasus Communications, Inc., 2011
[Li 2015] Zengyang Li, Paris Avgeriou, and Peng Liang. “A systematic mapping study on technical debt and its management,” Journal of Systems and Software 101, 193-220, 2015.
[Morris 2012] Ben Morris. “How to manage down the payments on your technical debt,” Ben Morris Software Architecture blog, September 3, 2012.
Available here; Retrieved December 30, 2016. This blog entry contains an assertion that controlling formation of new technical debt requires only “diligence, ownership and governance.”
[Pietola 2012] Mikko Pietola. “Technical Excellence In Agile Software Projects,” Master’s Thesis, Information Technology, Oulu University of Applied Sciences, 2012.
[Venners 2003] Bill Venners. “Don’t Live with Broken Windows: A Conversation with Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, Part I,” blog at Artima.com, March 3, 2003.
[Note b] Articles and blog entries questioning the validity of the Broken Windows theory of crime prevention:
[Nuwer 2013] Rachel Nuwer. “Sorry, Malcolm Gladwell: NYC’s Drop in Crime Not Due to Broken Window Theory,” SmartNews blog at smithsonian.com, February 6, 2013.
[Harcourt 2006a] Bernard E. Harcourt. “Bratton's ‘broken windows’:No matter what you’ve heard, the chief’s policing method wastes precious funds,” Los Angeles Times, April 20, 2006.
[Harcourt 2006b] Bernard E. Harcourt and Jens Ludwig. “Broken Windows: New Evidence From New York City and a Five-City Social Experiment,” University of Chicago Law Review, Vol. 73, 2006.
[Ross 2000] Jeanne W. Ross and David F. Feeny. “The Evolving Role of the CIO,” in Framing the Domains of IS Management Research: Glimpsing the Future through the Past, edited by Robert W. Zmud. Pinnaflex, 2000.
When the owner of an asset, especially a software asset, contracts to provide a capability to a customer incorporating a use of that asset, the work involved might require modification or enhancement of that asset. When the contract permits such work, without transferring ownership of the asset itself, performing it is relatively straightforward, provided the work can be done in a manner compatible with any pre-existing or anticipated future other uses of the asset. But some contract restrictions can cause the owner of the asset to incur technical debt.
A power adaptor/converter for international travelers with U.S. standard equipment. This device provides conversion for both hardware connection and voltage supplied. The wide variation in electric power standards worldwide can be viewed as a technical debt. Someday, in the probably distant future, a world standard will emerge and that debt will be retired. Until then, adaptors like these are travel necessities.
But some contracts restrict such work. For example, for a government customer, ownership of the work performed might be required to transfer to the government customer. Potentially, all of the work might be classified as a national secret. In either of these cases, to retain control of the asset, the owner/contractor arranges to perform all of the work outside the periphery of the asset. To accomplish this, the owner/contractor might interface to the asset through an adaptor that can be transferred to the government customer, or which can be classified as secret as the case may be, thereby insulating the original asset from these ownership restrictions.
The result is tolerable after one such contract is completed. But over time, as the number of adaptors increases, they become a form of technical debt. Each must be maintained against any changes in the original asset. Moreover, making changes to the original asset can become a project of such scale that the temptation to create a static “clone” of the asset for each customer is irresistible. When that happens, any technical debt already present in the asset is also cloned. And any work performed to correct defects in the asset must be performed on each affected clone.
The problem is more general than suggested above. It also appears in the case of software offered for multiple platforms, or multiple versions of a single platform.
But it gets worse. Suppose the maintainers decide to update the asset to make it more extensible, or to make it more maintainable. That update, including all testing and documentation, must then be performed on each clone. If the asset owner elects not to update all clones, then the clones will begin to diverge from each other. Engineers performing tasks on one of the clones must then have knowledge of how it differs from other clones. If a new defect is discovered, it might or might not be present in every clone. Implementing a new extension or other modification might not be possible in all clones, or it might have to be implemented differently in some clones. Life can get very complicated.
Organizations entering into contracts of this kind would be wise either to include language limiting their obligations to maintain the original asset against any changes, internal or external, in its ability to perform its functions. Or they might include an explicit statement of the parties’ intentions relative to financial support for any continuing obligations to maintain that asset.
Organizations offering products for multiple platforms would be wise to consider as strategic the management of technical debt that arises from platform multiplicity. Sound management of this form of technical debt can extend their ability to support multiple platforms, which can dramatically increase returns on investment in the core asset.
References
[Allman 2012] Eric Allman. “Managing Technical Debt: Shortcuts that save money and time today can cost you down the road,” ACM Queue, 10:3, March 23, 2012.
[Bossavit 2013] Laurent Bossavit (@Morendil), “Zero Code Ownership will lead to a tragedy-of-the-commons situation, where everybody bemoans how ‘technical debt’ makes their job suck.”, a tweet published April 20, 2013.
[Bromley 1989] Daniel W. Bromley and Michael M. Cernea. “The Management of Common Property Natural Resources: Some Conceptual and Operational Fallacies.” World Bank Discussion Paper WDP-57. 1989.
[Eck 2006] J. Eck and E.R. Maguire. “Have Changes in Policing Reduced Violent Crime? An Assessment of the Evidence,” in Blumstein, Alfred, and Joel Wallman, eds. The Crime Drop in America, Revised Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 207-265.
[Frank 2005] Frank, Kenneth T., Brian Petrie, Jae S. Choi, William C. Leggett. "Trophic Cascades in a Formerly Cod-Dominated Ecosystem." Science. 308 (5728): 1621–1623. June 10, 2005.
[Harcourt 1998] Bernard E. Harcourt. “Reflecting on the Subject: A Critique of the Social Influence Conception of Deterrence, the Broken Windows Theory, and Order-Maintenance Policing New York Style,” 97 Michigan Law Review 291, 1998.
[Kim 2011] Daniel H. Kim and Virginia Anderson. Systems Archetype Basics: From Story to Structure, Waltham, Massachusetts: Pegasus Communications, Inc., 2011
[Li 2015] Zengyang Li, Paris Avgeriou, and Peng Liang. “A systematic mapping study on technical debt and its management,” Journal of Systems and Software 101, 193-220, 2015.
[Morris 2012] Ben Morris. “How to manage down the payments on your technical debt,” Ben Morris Software Architecture blog, September 3, 2012.
Available here; Retrieved December 30, 2016. This blog entry contains an assertion that controlling formation of new technical debt requires only “diligence, ownership and governance.”
[Pietola 2012] Mikko Pietola. “Technical Excellence In Agile Software Projects,” Master’s Thesis, Information Technology, Oulu University of Applied Sciences, 2012.
[Venners 2003] Bill Venners. “Don’t Live with Broken Windows: A Conversation with Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, Part I,” blog at Artima.com, March 3, 2003.
[Note b] Articles and blog entries questioning the validity of the Broken Windows theory of crime prevention:
[Nuwer 2013] Rachel Nuwer. “Sorry, Malcolm Gladwell: NYC’s Drop in Crime Not Due to Broken Window Theory,” SmartNews blog at smithsonian.com, February 6, 2013.
[Harcourt 2006a] Bernard E. Harcourt. “Bratton's ‘broken windows’:No matter what you’ve heard, the chief’s policing method wastes precious funds,” Los Angeles Times, April 20, 2006.
[Harcourt 2006b] Bernard E. Harcourt and Jens Ludwig. “Broken Windows: New Evidence From New York City and a Five-City Social Experiment,” University of Chicago Law Review, Vol. 73, 2006.
[Ross 2000] Jeanne W. Ross and David F. Feeny. “The Evolving Role of the CIO,” in Framing the Domains of IS Management Research: Glimpsing the Future through the Past, edited by Robert W. Zmud. Pinnaflex, 2000.
Some projects undergo budget depletion exercises when their budgets are reduced, or when there’s evidence that the funds remaining will be insufficient to complete the work originally planned. Formats vary, but the typical goal of these exercises is downscoping — removing, relaxing, deferring, or suspending some requirements. Since funds are limited, downscoping is often executed in a manner that leads to technical debt.
The Old River Control Complex on the Mississippi River. Built and operated by the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) the Old River Control Complex is used for controlling the flow from the Mississippi into a distributary known as the Atchafalaya River. Were it not for this facility, the Mississippi would long ago have rerouted itself into the Atchafalaya, which has a much steeper gradient to the ocean. Since that change would have deprived New Orleans and all the industrial facilities along the lower Mississippi of access to the water and navigational channels they now enjoy, USACE maintains a complex of flow control facilities to prevent Nature taking its course, and to prevent flooding along the lower Mississippi. The industrial facilities of the lower Mississippi constitute a technical debt, in the sense that their existence is no longer compatible with the “update” Nature is trying to deploy, in the form of rerouting the flow of water from the Mississippi to the Atchafalaya. Because our national budget doesn’t allow for repositioning the city of New Orleans and all the industrial facilities from the lower Mississippi to somewhere along the Atchafalaya, we’ve elected to redirect the flow of water from the course Nature prefers to a course more compatible with the existing industrial base. Operating and maintaining the Old River Control Complex, together with a multitude of levees, dredging projects, and gates throughout lower Louisiana, are the MICs we pay for the technical debt that is the outdated position of the city of New Orleans and its associated industrial base. For more about Atchafalaya, see the famous New Yorker article by John McPhee [MacFee 1987]. Photo courtesy USACEHere’s an illustrative scenario. At the time downscoping begins, the work product might contain incomplete implementations of items that are to be removed from the list of objectives. A most insidious type of debt, and most difficult to detect, consists of accommodations contained in surviving artifacts that are no longer needed because the items they were intended to support have been cancelled. This class of technical debt is difficult to detect because the affected system components appear to be merely overly complicated. Recognizing it as a residual of a cancelled capability requires knowledge of its history. Unless these artifacts are documented at the time of the downscoping, that knowledge may be lost.
Other items of technical debt that arise from budget depletion include tests that no longer need to be executed, or documentation that’s no longer consistent with the rest of the work product, or user interface artifacts no longer needed. When budgets become sufficiently tight, funds aren’t available for documenting these items of technical debt as debt, and the enterprise can lose track of them when team members move on or are reassigned.
In some instances, budget depletion takes effect even before the work begins. This happens, for example, when project champions unwittingly underestimate costs in order to obtain approval for the work they have in mind. The unreasonableness of the budget becomes clear soon after the budget is approved, and the effects described above take hold soon thereafter.
Budget depletion can also have some of the same effects as schedule pressure. When the team devises the downscoping plan, it must make choices about what to include in the revised project objectives. In some cases, the desire to include some work can bias estimates of the effort required to execute it. If the team underestimates the work involved, the result is increased pressure to perform that work. With increased pressure comes technical debt. See “With all deliberate urgency” for more.
A policy that could limit technical debt formation in response to budget depletion would require identifying the technical debt such action creates, and later retiring that debt. Because these actions do require resources, they consume some of the savings that were supposed to accrue from downscoping. In some cases, they could consume that amount in its entirety, or more. Most decision-makers probably over-estimate the effectiveness of the downscoping strategy. Often, it simply reduces current expenses by trading them for increased technical debt, which raises future expenses and decreases opportunities in future periods.
References
[Allman 2012] Eric Allman. “Managing Technical Debt: Shortcuts that save money and time today can cost you down the road,” ACM Queue, 10:3, March 23, 2012.
[Bossavit 2013] Laurent Bossavit (@Morendil), “Zero Code Ownership will lead to a tragedy-of-the-commons situation, where everybody bemoans how ‘technical debt’ makes their job suck.”, a tweet published April 20, 2013.
[Bromley 1989] Daniel W. Bromley and Michael M. Cernea. “The Management of Common Property Natural Resources: Some Conceptual and Operational Fallacies.” World Bank Discussion Paper WDP-57. 1989.
[Eck 2006] J. Eck and E.R. Maguire. “Have Changes in Policing Reduced Violent Crime? An Assessment of the Evidence,” in Blumstein, Alfred, and Joel Wallman, eds. The Crime Drop in America, Revised Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 207-265.
[Frank 2005] Frank, Kenneth T., Brian Petrie, Jae S. Choi, William C. Leggett. "Trophic Cascades in a Formerly Cod-Dominated Ecosystem." Science. 308 (5728): 1621–1623. June 10, 2005.
[Harcourt 1998] Bernard E. Harcourt. “Reflecting on the Subject: A Critique of the Social Influence Conception of Deterrence, the Broken Windows Theory, and Order-Maintenance Policing New York Style,” 97 Michigan Law Review 291, 1998.
[Kim 2011] Daniel H. Kim and Virginia Anderson. Systems Archetype Basics: From Story to Structure, Waltham, Massachusetts: Pegasus Communications, Inc., 2011
[Li 2015] Zengyang Li, Paris Avgeriou, and Peng Liang. “A systematic mapping study on technical debt and its management,” Journal of Systems and Software 101, 193-220, 2015.
[Morris 2012] Ben Morris. “How to manage down the payments on your technical debt,” Ben Morris Software Architecture blog, September 3, 2012.
Available here; Retrieved December 30, 2016. This blog entry contains an assertion that controlling formation of new technical debt requires only “diligence, ownership and governance.”
[Pietola 2012] Mikko Pietola. “Technical Excellence In Agile Software Projects,” Master’s Thesis, Information Technology, Oulu University of Applied Sciences, 2012.
[Venners 2003] Bill Venners. “Don’t Live with Broken Windows: A Conversation with Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, Part I,” blog at Artima.com, March 3, 2003.
[Note b] Articles and blog entries questioning the validity of the Broken Windows theory of crime prevention:
[Nuwer 2013] Rachel Nuwer. “Sorry, Malcolm Gladwell: NYC’s Drop in Crime Not Due to Broken Window Theory,” SmartNews blog at smithsonian.com, February 6, 2013.
[Harcourt 2006a] Bernard E. Harcourt. “Bratton's ‘broken windows’:No matter what you’ve heard, the chief’s policing method wastes precious funds,” Los Angeles Times, April 20, 2006.
[Harcourt 2006b] Bernard E. Harcourt and Jens Ludwig. “Broken Windows: New Evidence From New York City and a Five-City Social Experiment,” University of Chicago Law Review, Vol. 73, 2006.
[Ross 2000] Jeanne W. Ross and David F. Feeny. “The Evolving Role of the CIO,” in Framing the Domains of IS Management Research: Glimpsing the Future through the Past, edited by Robert W. Zmud. Pinnaflex, 2000.
Most of the non-technical precursors of technical debt that afflict in-house work also afflict outsourced work. For example, the planning fallacy affects internal planners, but it also afflicts the bidders for contracts offered by the enterprise in the context of outsourcing. As described in “Unrealistic optimism: the planning fallacy and the n-person prisoner’s dilemma,” Boehm, et al., [Boehm 2016] call this the “Conspiracy of Optimism.” But outsourcing engineering work can introduce pathways for incurring technical debt that are specific to outsourcing.
Green fields. Greenfield outsourcing, also known as startup outsourcing, is the outsourcing of activity that has never been performed within the enterprise. It’s especially tricky with respect to technical debt formation, because much of the expertise necessary to perform the work being outsourced is probably not resident within the enterprise. That void in enterprise expertise makes for difficulties in managing technical debt in the outsourced artifacts.
The risks of incurring technical debt associated with outsourcing are inherently elevated, even setting aside those factors that also afflict in-house activity. When most enterprises contract for development of systems or software, the criteria for acceptance rarely include specifications for maintainability or extensibility. This happens, in part, because such qualitative specifications are so difficult to define quantitatively. That’s why the condition of deliverables relative to maintainability and extensibility is so variable. Outsourced deliverables can best be described as bearing an unknown level of technical debt.
The root cause of the problem is likely a lack of a universally accepted metrics for quantifying technical debt [Li 2015]. That’s why it’s difficult to specify in the vendor contract an acceptability threshold for technical debt. And since the consequences of the presence of technical debt in deliverables potentially do not become clear during the lifetime of the contract under which the debt was incurred, years may pass before the issue becomes evident, which complicates the task of understanding the root cause of the problem.
In what follows, I use the term vendor to denote the organization to which work has been outsourced, and the term enterprise to denote the organization that has outsourced a portion of its engineering work. The retained organization is the portion of the enterprise directly relevant to the outsourced work, but which was not itself outsourced. Among the mechanisms that lead to incurring technical debt in the outsourcing context are the six mechanisms sketched below. Gauging the size of these effects by auditing deliverables or by auditing the internal processes of the vendor could be helpful in managing levels of technical debt arising from outsourcing.
This list isn’t intended to be exhaustive. Quite possibly other phenomena also contribute to technical debt formation in the context of outsourcing.
Progressive erosion of retained organization capabilities
Over time, the enterprise can expect erosion of the engineering expertise needed to manage, evaluate, understand, or, if need be, to re-insource (or backsource) the work that has been outsourced [Willcocks 2004][Beardsell 2010]. Typically, staff who formerly performed the outsourced work do move on to other work, voluntarily or not, either within the enterprise or elsewhere. Indeed, cost savings from terminations and employee buyouts often accompany — and economically justify — outsourcing decisions. But even if the enterprise continues to employ the people who formerly performed the work that is now outsourced, those employees, filling new roles, can become less familiar with the current work and therefore less able to perform it. And since they are now engaged in other assignments, their availability is limited. In the public sector, the organizations that perform the outsourced work exacerbate this phenomenon by recruiting from the agencies they serve [Kusnet 2007]. In manufacturing, Kinkel et al. suggest that, paraphrasing, outsourcing disturbs the formation of internal competence [Kinkel 2016].
In short, outsourcing engineering efforts can erode the ability of the enterprise to perform internally the work that is outsourced, or to monitor or evaluate it when performed by the vendor. Consequently, the enterprise is less able to monitor, evaluate, or retire any technical debt that accumulates in the outsourced work products. A policy that would address this risk is one that would (a) require retained organizational capability sufficient to assess the effect on technical debt of any outsourced engineering work; (b) require attention to technical debt issues in any financial models used in making the initial outsourcing decision; (c) require financial models to include the effects of technical debt and controlling technical debt when deciding whether to extend outsourcing contracts with vendors.
Stovepiping among vendors
Most multi-vendor efforts use a separation-of-concerns approach [Laplante 2007] to dividing the work. That is, each vendor is empowered to use any approach it can, consistent with its own contract and statement of work. In some cases, two or more vendors might have overlapping needs that cause them each to produce similar capabilities as elements of their respective deliverables. Sharing of their results is of course possible, but unless both of their contracts anticipate the need for sharing, sharing is unlikely. Failure to share those results that could have been shared can lead to incurring unrecognized technical debt.
Stovepiping within vendors
With regard to the efforts of a single outsource vendor, it’s possible that different teams or individuals working for that vendor might unwittingly create elements with overlapping capabilities. That duplication could lead to technical debt, or it could constitute technical debt in itself. For example, two teams working for the same vendor might have similar testing needs, and might develop testing tools independently. As a second example, in a version of stovepiping combined with temporal displacement, suppose that one team is unaware that a previous effort for the same customer had already developed a capability that it now needs. That team then might re-create that already-existing capability.
Stovepiping within vendors is less likely when the vendor operates under a single vendor technical lead, and the enterprise interacts with that single lead through a single in-house technical lead. When either side of the relationship is managed through multiple contacts, stovepiping is more likely, and new technical debt is more likely to form.
Loss of continuity in the outsourced engineering staff
Unless specified in the agreement between the vendor and the enterprise, staff turnover or reassignment within the vendor organization, between one version of the product or service and the next, can lead to technical debt in just the same way that turnover in-house can lead to technical debt. With outsourcing, however, the vendor has little internalized motivation to control this phenomenon, and the enterprise likely has less control—and less awareness—of staff assignments within the vendor organization than it does within the enterprise. Thus, loss of continuity in the outsourced engineering staff is both more likely and more likely to lead to technical debt.
Reduced coordination of engineering approaches and business objectives
Lack of coordination between engineering approaches and business planning can cause engineers to create and deploy artifacts that must be revisited later, when they learn of business plans that were unknown to the engineers at the time they produced those artifacts. See “Failure to communicate long-term business strategy.” This scenario is more likely, and possibly irresolvable, when the enterprise withholds its long-term plans from the outsourcing vendor to protect its strategy.
Hiring and retention problems
In some instances, commonly called startup outsourcing or greenfield outsourcing, the work being outsourced has never been performed within the enterprise [Delen 2007]. In these cases, typically, the enterprise must then reassign existing employees or hire new employees to interface with the outsource vendor. These roles are analogous to remote supervisors, except that the teams they supervise are not employees of the enterprise. Hiring and retaining people for these roles can be difficult, because of startup challenges both within the enterprise and within the vendor organization. Recruitment and especially retention problems in these roles can decrease the likelihood of controlling technical debt, and increase the likelihood of incurring technical debt.
References
[Allman 2012] Eric Allman. “Managing Technical Debt: Shortcuts that save money and time today can cost you down the road,” ACM Queue, 10:3, March 23, 2012.
[Beardsell 2010] Julie Beardsell. “IT Backsourcing: is it the solution to innovation?”, SMC Working Paper Series, Issue: 02/2010, Swiss Management Center University, 2010.
[Bossavit 2013] Laurent Bossavit (@Morendil), “Zero Code Ownership will lead to a tragedy-of-the-commons situation, where everybody bemoans how ‘technical debt’ makes their job suck.”, a tweet published April 20, 2013.
[Bromley 1989] Daniel W. Bromley and Michael M. Cernea. “The Management of Common Property Natural Resources: Some Conceptual and Operational Fallacies.” World Bank Discussion Paper WDP-57. 1989.
[Delen 2007] Guus Delen. “Decision and Control Factors for IT-sourcing,” in Handbook of Network and System Administration, Jan Bergstra and Mark Burgess, eds., Boston: Elsevier, 929-946, 2007.
[Eck 2006] J. Eck and E.R. Maguire. “Have Changes in Policing Reduced Violent Crime? An Assessment of the Evidence,” in Blumstein, Alfred, and Joel Wallman, eds. The Crime Drop in America, Revised Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 207-265.
[Frank 2005] Frank, Kenneth T., Brian Petrie, Jae S. Choi, William C. Leggett. "Trophic Cascades in a Formerly Cod-Dominated Ecosystem." Science. 308 (5728): 1621–1623. June 10, 2005.
[Harcourt 1998] Bernard E. Harcourt. “Reflecting on the Subject: A Critique of the Social Influence Conception of Deterrence, the Broken Windows Theory, and Order-Maintenance Policing New York Style,” 97 Michigan Law Review 291, 1998.
[Kim 2011] Daniel H. Kim and Virginia Anderson. Systems Archetype Basics: From Story to Structure, Waltham, Massachusetts: Pegasus Communications, Inc., 2011
[Kinkel 2016] Steffen Kinkel, Angela Jäger, Djerdj Horvath, and Bernhard Rieder. “The effects of in-house manufacturing and outsourcing on companies’ profits and productivity,” 23rd International Annual EurOMA Conference, At Trondheim, Volume: 23, June 2016.
[Li 2015] Zengyang Li, Paris Avgeriou, and Peng Liang. “A systematic mapping study on technical debt and its management,” Journal of Systems and Software 101, 193-220, 2015.
[Morris 2012] Ben Morris. “How to manage down the payments on your technical debt,” Ben Morris Software Architecture blog, September 3, 2012.
Available here; Retrieved December 30, 2016. This blog entry contains an assertion that controlling formation of new technical debt requires only “diligence, ownership and governance.”
[Pietola 2012] Mikko Pietola. “Technical Excellence In Agile Software Projects,” Master’s Thesis, Information Technology, Oulu University of Applied Sciences, 2012.
[Venners 2003] Bill Venners. “Don’t Live with Broken Windows: A Conversation with Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, Part I,” blog at Artima.com, March 3, 2003.
[Note b] Articles and blog entries questioning the validity of the Broken Windows theory of crime prevention:
[Nuwer 2013] Rachel Nuwer. “Sorry, Malcolm Gladwell: NYC’s Drop in Crime Not Due to Broken Window Theory,” SmartNews blog at smithsonian.com, February 6, 2013.
[Harcourt 2006a] Bernard E. Harcourt. “Bratton's ‘broken windows’:No matter what you’ve heard, the chief’s policing method wastes precious funds,” Los Angeles Times, April 20, 2006.
[Harcourt 2006b] Bernard E. Harcourt and Jens Ludwig. “Broken Windows: New Evidence From New York City and a Five-City Social Experiment,” University of Chicago Law Review, Vol. 73, 2006.
[Ross 2000] Jeanne W. Ross and David F. Feeny. “The Evolving Role of the CIO,” in Framing the Domains of IS Management Research: Glimpsing the Future through the Past, edited by Robert W. Zmud. Pinnaflex, 2000.
[Willcocks 2004] L. Willcocks, J. Hindle, D. Feeny, and M. Lacity. “IT and Business Process Outsourcing: The Knowledge Potential,” Information Systems Management 21:3, 7-15, 2004.
