Useful projections of MPrin might not be attainable
Last updated on July 8th, 2021 at 11:50 am
Summary
Expect the unexpected with technical debt retirement efforts. Technical debt retirement efforts can conflict with ongoing operations, maintenance of existing capabilities, development of new capabilities, cyberdefense, or other technical debt retirement efforts. Although these conflicts are technical in nature, resolving them can involve business priorities at any level. Planners must be aware of these potential conflicts, and coordinate with their leaders. Policymakers can make important contributions to the enterprise mission if they can devise guidelines and frameworks for resolving these conflicts as closely as possible to the technical level.
For planning purposes, it’s necessary from time to time to make projections of debt retirement costs (MPrin) for a given class of technical debt. The need arises when planning debt retirement, or when preparing debt retirement options for determining resource allocations. Although retiring some kinds of technical debt is straightforward, other kinds of debt can become intertwined with each other. Retiring still others might appear to be easy, but actual retirement efforts expose unanticipated entanglements. Moreover, debt retirement efforts can sometimes interact with other debt retirement efforts, operations, maintenance, cyberdefense, and new development in both expected and unexpected ways. For these reasons, making estimates of the MPrin with enough precision to be useful can be notoriously difficult.
Money is fungible; people are not
A tangle of cordage on board ship. Different kinds of technical debt can become entangled with each other. Untangling them can affect various other engineering efforts. Preparing an asset for a debt retirement effort by doing some preliminary untangling might be wise before trying to estimate the MPrin of any affected class of technical debt.These considerations rarely arise when planning retirement of financial debts, because money is fungible. We might indeed have other uses for financial resources. But every unit of cash is equivalent to every other. That freedom isn’t necessarily available when planning resource allocations for technical debt retirement.
For example, not every engineer is equally capable of addressing every problem. Some people are particularly capable for certain kinds of work, and not very capable for other kinds. The problem of scheduling specialists is notorious for generating bottlenecks. And split assignments create even more trouble. People aren’t fungible.
Last words
Planning retirement of a particular set of technical debt classes can be complicated. Such planning requires knowledge of any efforts with which that retirement effort might interact. That information might not be available or might not be known. In general, preliminary work to decouple these activities—often called ”refactoring”—can
In some instances, technical debt is actually a missing or incompletely implemented capability. If we retire the debt by completing the implementation, the MPrin is the cost of that effort, plus any training, testing, and lost revenue. If we retire the debt by halting or withdrawing the capability, the MPrin is the total cost of removal, plus testing and lost revenue.
The Metaphorical Principal of a technical debt that’s incurred as a result of a change in standards or regulations, internal or external, is the cost of bringing all affected assets into full compliance. Properly accounted for, however, the MPrin should include ripple effects, which are the changes in other assets that are required to keep them compatible with the assets that are directly affected.
Platform component upgrades often trigger the need to make changes in whatever sits atop the platform, to maintain compatibility with the platform. Those changes obviously contribute to MPrin. But less obvious are the contributions that arise from deferring the upgrade.
The MPrin of an asset that is subjected to new development or enhancement has some special characteristics. For an existing asset, new development can lead to duplication of capability. For new assets, unanticipated opportunities can transform into technical debt components that were not viewed as technical debt, without ever changing them in any way.
Some examples might help to clarify the differences between the principal of financial debts and the Metaphorical Principal of a technical debt. The examples to come in the next four posts are designed to illustrate the unique properties of MPrins of technical debts.
The principal amount of a financial debt and the metaphorical principal of a technical debt have very different properties. They are so different that it’s wise to avoid using the term “principal” to refer to the metaphorical principal of a technical debt. We use the term MPrin.
