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Legacy technical debt retirement decisions

Last updated on January 5th, 2019 at 10:32 am

Decisions to retire the legacy technical debt carried by irreplaceable assets are not to be taken lightly. As decision makers gather information and recommendations from all around the organization, most will discover that information and recommendations aren’t sufficient for making sound decisions about technical debt retirement. The issues are complex. Education is also needed. It’s entirely possible that in some organizations, confronted with a set of decisions regarding legacy technical debt retirement in irreplaceable assets, the existing executive team might be out of its depth. To understand how this situation can arise, let’s explore the nature of legacy technical debt retirement decisions.

A common technical debt retirement scenario

What compels the leaders of a large enterprise to consider retiring the technical debt encumbering one of its irreplaceable assets is fairly simple: cost. Decision makers usually begin by investigating the cost of replacing the asset—the option I’ve oh-so-cleverly called “Replace the Asset.” They then typically conclude that replacement isn’t affordable. At this point, many decision makers choose the option I’ve called “Do nothing.” Time passes. A succession of incidents occurs, in which repairs to the asset or enhancements of the asset are required. And I use the term required here to mean “essential to the viability of the business.”

Two alternatives to retiring legacy technical debt in irreplaceable assets
Two alternatives to retiring legacy technical debt in irreplaceable assets. Neither one works very well.

Engineers then do their best to meet the need, but the cost is high, and the work takes too long. The engineers explain that the problems are due, in part, to the heavy burden technical debt in this particular asset. Eventually the engineers are asked to estimate the cost of “cleaning things up.” Decision makers receive the estimates and conclude that it’s “unaffordable right now.” They ask the engineers to “make do.” In other words, they stick with the Do Nothing option.

After a number of cycles repeating this pattern, decision makers finally agree to provide time and resources for technical debt retirement, but only because it’s the least bad alternative. The other alternatives—Replace the Asset, and Do Nothing—clearly won’t work and haven’t worked, respectively.

So there we are. The organization has been forced by events to address the technical debt problems in this irreplaceable asset. And that’s where the trouble begins.

Decisions about retiring legacy technical debt

In scenarios like the one above, the fundamental decision has already been made: the enterprise will be retiring legacy technical debt from an irreplaceable asset. But that’s just the first ripple of waves of decisions to come, made by many people in a variety of roles throughout the enterprise. Let’s now have a look at a short catalog of what’s in store for such an enterprise.

Recall that most large technical debt retirement projects probably exhibit a high degree of wickedness in the sense of Rittel and Webber [Rittel 1973]. One consequence of this property is the need to avoid do-overs. That is, once we make a decision about how to proceed to the next bit of the work, we want that decision to be correct, or at least, good enough. It should not leave the enterprise in a state that’s more difficult to resolve than the state in which we found it. Since another property of wicked problems is the prevalence of surprises, most decisions must be made in a collaborative context, which affords the greatest possibility of opening the decision process to diverse perspectives. We must therefore regard collaborative decision-making at every level as a highly valued competency.

What follows is the promised catalog of decision types.

Strategic decisions

This decision category leads the list because it provides the highest leverage potential for changing enterprise behavior vis-à-vis technical debt. Organizations that are confronting the problem of technical debt retirement from irreplaceable assets would do well to begin by acknowledging that although they might be able to devise tactics for dealing with the debt burdening these assets right now, they must make a strategic change if they want to avoid a recurrence. Accumulating debt to a level sufficient to compel chartering a major debt retirement project took time. It took years of deferring the inevitable. A significant change of enterprise strategy is necessary.

When changing complex social systems, applying the concept of leverage provides a critical advantage. In this instance, following the work of Meadows [Meadows 1997] [Meadows 1999] [Meadows 2008], we can devise interventions at several points that can have great impact on both the level of technical debt and its rate of accumulation. The leverage points of greatest interest are Feedback Loops, Information Flows, Rules, and Goals. For example, the enterprise can set a strategic goal of a specific volume of incremental technical debt incurred per project, normalized by project budget, as I discussed in the post, “Leverage points for technical debt management.”

One might reasonably ask why enterprise strategy must change; wouldn’t a change in technology strategy suffice? Changing how engineers go about their work would help—indeed in most cases it’s necessary. But because the conditions and processes that lead to technical debt formation and persistence transcend engineering activities, additional changes are required to achieve the objective of controlling technical debt.

Some technical debt is strategic—it’s incurred as the result of a conscious business decision. But some is non-strategic. We might even be unaware of how it occurred. However, both kinds of technical debt can arise as a result of non-technical factors. Read a review of non-technical precursors of non-strategic technical debt.

Organizational decisions

Before chartering a technical debt retirement project (DRP) for an irreplaceable asset, or a group of irreplaceable assets, it’s wise to consider how to embed that project in the enterprise.

The default organizational form for debt retirement projects concerned with an asset A is usually the same form that would be used for major projects focused on asset A. If the Information Technology (IT) unit would normally address issues in A, the debt retirement effort usually would be organized under IT. If A is a software product normally attended to in a product group, that same group would likely have responsibility for the DRP for asset A.

Although these default organizational structures are somewhat sensible, both technically and politically, there’s an alternative approach worth investigating. It entails establishing a technical debt retirement function that becomes a center of excellence for executing technical debt retirement projects, and for developing and injecting sound technical debt management practice into the enterprise. Such an approach is especially useful if multiple debt retirement projects are needed.

The fundamental concept that makes the center-of-excellence approach necessary is the wickedness of the technical debt retirement problem. To address the problem at scale requires capabilities beyond what IT can provide; beyond what product units can provide; indeed, beyond what any of the conventional organizational elements can provide. The reason for this is that the explosion of technical debt in most organizations is an emergent phenomenon. Every organizational unit contributed to the formation of the problem. And every organizational unit must contribute to its resolution.

A technical debt center of excellence is an approach that might be capable not only of synthesizing the expertise of all elements of the enterprise, but also might be capable of bringing new approaches into the enterprise from external sources.

Engineering decisions

Engineers have a tendency to identify and classify technical debt items on technical grounds. Further, they tend to set technical debt retirement priorities on a similar basis. That is, they’re inclined to set priorities highest for those debt items that they (a) recognize as debt items and (b) see as imposing high levels of MICs charged to engineering accounts. Engineers are less likely to assign high priorities to technical debt that generates MICs that are charged to revenue, or to other accounts, because those MICs are less evident—and in many cases invisible—to engineers.

Decisions regarding recognition of technical debt items and setting priorities for retiring them must take technological imperatives into account, but they must also account for MICs of all forms. Priorities must be consistent with enterprise imperatives.

Decisions about pace

Paraphrasing Albert Einstein, technical debt retirement projects should be executed as rapidly as possible, and no faster. The tendency among non-engineers and non-technical decision-makers is to push for rapid completion of debt retirement projects, for three reasons. First, everyone, like the engineers, wants the results that debt retirement will bring. Second, everyone, like the engineers, wants an end to the inevitable disruptions debt retirement projects cause. And finally, the longer the project is underway, the more it might cost.

For these reasons, once the decision to retire the debt is firmly in hand, the enterprise might have a tendency to apply financial resources at a rate that exceeds the ability of the project team to execute the project responsibly. When that happens, rework results. And for wicked problems like debt retirement, rework is the path to catastrophe.

Decisions about pace and team scale need to be regarded as tentative. Regular reviews can ensure that the resource level is neither too low nor too high. Even when the engineers are given control over these decisions, they must be reviewed, because pressures for rapid completion can be so severe that they can compromise the judgment of engineers about how well they can manage the resources applied to the project.

Resource decisions

Debt retirement projects concerned with legacy irreplaceable assets are different from most other projects the enterprise undertakes. Estimates of the labor hours required are more likely to be incorrect on the low side than are analogous estimates for other projects, because so much of the work involves pieces of assets with which few engineering staff have any experience. But with respect to resources, underestimating labor requirements isn’t the real problem. Non-labor resources are the real problem.

Because the assets are irreplaceable, it’s likely that they’re needed for ongoing operations. In some cases, the assets are needed continuously. Many organizations have kept such assets operational by exploiting hours of downtime during periods of low demand, usually scheduled and announced in advance. While these practices are likely sufficient for the relatively minor and infrequent changes usually associated with routine maintenance and enhancement, debt retirement imposes much more severe burdens on the organization than these short access windows can support. Effective debt retirement projects need far more access to the asset—a level of access that continuous delivery practices can provide [Humble 2010].

However, assets whose designs predate the widespread use of modern practices such as continuous delivery might not be compatible with the infrastructure that these practices require. And in organizations that haven’t yet adopted such practices, staff familiar with them might be in short supply. For these reasons, we must regard as developmental any early projects whose objectives are retiring technical debt from irreplaceable assets. They’re retiring the technical debt, of course, but they’re also developing the practices and infrastructure needed to support technical debt retirement projects. This dual purpose is what drives the surprisingly high non-labor costs and investments associated with early technical debt retirement projects.

The investments required might include such “items” as a staging environment, which “is a testing environment identical to the production environment” [Humble 2010]; extensive test automation, including results analysis; blue-green deployment infrastructure; automation-assisted rollback; and zero-downtime release infrastructure. Decisions to make investments require an appreciation of their value to the enterprise. They enable the enterprise to deal effectively with the wicked problem of technical debt retirement.

Last words

Because every situation and every organization is unique, few general guidelines are available for making these decisions. The criteria most organizations have been using for dealing with (or avoiding) the issue of technical debt have produced the problems they now face. So, to succeed from this point, whatever criteria they use in the future must be different. My own view is that short-term thinking is at the heart of the problem, but it’s a wicked problem. The long-term solution will not be simple.

References

[Humble 2010] Jez Humble and David Farley. Continuous delivery: reliable software releases through build, test, and deployment automation, Pearson Education, 2010.

Cited in:

[Meadows 1997] Donella H. Meadows. “Places to Intervene in a System,” Whole Earth, Winter 1997.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 28, 2018

Cited in:

[Meadows 1999] Donella H. Meadows. “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System,” Hartland VT: The Sustainability Institute, 1999.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 2, 2018.

Cited in:

[Meadows 2008] Donella H. Meadows and Diana Wright. Thinking in Systems: A Primer. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[Rittel 1973] Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning”, Policy Sciences 4, 1973, 155-169.

Available: here; Retrieved: October 16, 2018

Cited in:

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Exogenous technical debt

Last updated on July 24th, 2018 at 07:30 pm

Mastering understanding of exogenous technical debt—debt that arises from causes not directly related to the asset that bears the debt—is essential to controlling technical debt formation. Exogenous technical debt is particularly troublesome to those who work on the affected assets. They can’t control its formation, and they’re rarely responsible for creating it. But their internal customers and those who control resources often fail to understand this. Indeed, those who work on the affected assets are often blamed for the formation of exogenous technical debt even though they had no role in its formation, and could have done nothing to prevent its formation.

Asbestos with muscovite.
Asbestos with muscovite. Asbestos is a family of six minerals that occur naturally in fibrous form. The fibers are all known carcinogens. Until 1990, it was widely used in many common building materials, including insulation, plaster, and drywall joint compound. It is now banned, but it’s present in many existing structures, including homes and offices. The installation of the ban caused these structures to incur exogenous technical debt. Photo by Aramgutang courtesy Wikipedia.

Technical debt is exogenous when it’s brought about by an activity not directly related to the assets in which the debt appears. The word exogenous comes from the Greek exo– (outside) + –genous (related to producing). So exogenous technical debt is that portion of an asset’s debt that comes about from activities or decisions that don’t involve the asset directly.

Because so much technical debt is produced indirectly, controlling its direct formation—for example, by engineering teams—isn’t sufficient for achieving enterprise control of technical debt formation. To control technical debt formation, we must track which activities produce it, including both direct and indirect effects. Allocating technical debt retirement costs to the activities that brought that debt about, even if the allocation doesn’t affect budget authority for those activities, is therefore a useful practice. Knowledge about which past activities created technical debt, and how much, is helpful for long-term reduction in the rate of technical debt formation.

When we think of technical debt, we tend to think of activities that produce it relatively directly. We often imagine it as resulting solely from engineering activity, or from decisions not to undertake engineering activity. In either case the activity involved, whether undertaken or not, is activity directly involving the asset that carries—or will be carrying—the technical debt. This kind of technical debt is endogenous technical debt. The word endogenous comes from the Greek endo– (within or inside) + –genous (related to producing).  So endogenous technical debt is that portion of an asset’s debt that comes about from activities or decisions that directly involve the asset.

More about endogenous technical debt in future posts. For now, let’s look more closely at exogenous technical debt, and its policy implications.

Examples of exogenous technical debt

In “Spontaneous generation,” I examined one scenario in which technical debt formation occurs spontaneously—that is, in the absence of engineering activity. Specifically, I noted how the emergence of the HTML5 standard led to the formation of technical debt in some (if not all) existing Web sites, in the sense that they didn’t exploit capabilities that had become available in HTML5. Moreover, some sites whose developers had elected to emulate capabilities of the new standard by exploiting alternative technologies needed rehabilitation to remove the emulation and replace it with use of facilities in the HTML5 standard. All of these artifacts—including those that existed, and those that didn’t—comprised technical debt. This scenario thus led to the formation of exogenous technical debt.

In a second example, AMUFC, A Made-Up Fictitious Corporation, incurs technical debt when the vendor that supplies the operating system (OS) for AMUFC’s desktop computers announces the date of the end of extended support for the version of the OS in use at AMUFC. Because the end of extended support brings an end to security updates, AMUFC must retire that debt by migrating to the next version of that vendor’s OS before extended support actually ends.

In both of these examples, the forces that lead to formation of exogenous technical debt are external to both the enterprise and the enterprise’s assets. But what makes technical debt exogenous is that the forces that led to its formation are unrelated to any of the engineering work being performed on the asset that carries the debt. This restriction is loose enough to also include technical debt that arises from any change or activity external to the asset, but within the enterprise.

Exogenous technical debt arising from actions within the enterprise

Exogenous technical debt can arise from activities or decisions that take place entirely within the enterprise.

For example, consider a line of mobile devices developed and marketed by AMUFC (A Made-Up Fictitious Corporation). Until this past year, AMUFC has been developing ever more capable devices, thereby extending its line of offerings at the high end—the more expensive and capable members of the line. But this past quarter, AMUFC developed a low-end member of the line, and as often happens, price constraints led to innovations that could produce considerable savings in manufacturing costs if those innovations were applied to all members of the line. In effect, then, the designs of the previously developed models in this line of devices have incurred exogenous technical debt. The debt is exogenous because the activity that led to debt formation was not performed on the assets that now carry the debt, even though the activity that led to debt formation occurred within the enterprise. This kind of exogenous technical debt might be termed asset-exogenous. Exogenous technical debt of the kind that’s incurred by activity beyond the enterprise might be termed enterprise-exogenous.

Exogeneity versus endogeneity

For asset-exogenous technical debt, ambiguity between endogeneity and exogeneity can arise. The example above regarding the line of mobile devices produced by AMUFC provides an illustration.

For convenience, call the team that developed one of the high-end devices Team High. Call the team that developed the low-end device Team Low. From the perspective of Team High, the technical debt due to the innovations discovered by Team Low is exogenous. But from the perspective of the VP Mobile Devices, that same technical debt might be regarded as endogenous. The debt can be endogenous at VP level because it’s possible to regard the entire product line as a single asset, and that might actually be the preferred perspective of VP Mobile Devices.

Exogeneity and legacy technical debt

The technical debt portfolio of a given asset can contain a mix a technical debt that arose from various past incidents. In assessing the condition of the asset, it’s useful to distinguish this existing debt from debt that’s incurred as a consequence of any current activity or decisions. Call this pre-existing technical debt legacy technical debt.

The legacy technical debt carried by an asset is technical debt associated with that asset, and which exists in that asset in any form prior to undertaking work on that asset. For example, in planning a project to renovate the hallways and common areas of a high-rise apartment building, workers discover that beneath the existing carpeting is a layer of floor tile containing asbestos. Management has decided to remove the tile. In this context, the floor tile can be viewed as legacy technical debt. It isn’t directly related to the objectives of the current renovation, but removing it will enhance the safety of future renovations, enable certification of the building as asbestos-free, increase the property value, and reduce the cost of eventual demolition. In this situation asbestos removal amounts to retirement of legacy technical debt, and accounting for it as part of the common-area renovation would be misleading.

When contemplating efforts to retire legacy technical debt, exogeneity becomes a factor in allocating the necessary resources. If the debt in question is enterprise-exogenous, then we can justifiably budget the effort from enterprise-level accounts if appropriate. For other cases, other pools of resources become relevant depending on what actions created the debt. For example, if the exogenous technical debt arose because of a departmental change in standards, debt retirement costs can justifiably be allocated to the standards effort. If the exogenous technical debt arose from innovations in other members of the asset’s product line, those debt retirement costs can justifiably be allocated to the product line.

Policy insights

Understanding the properties of exogenous technical debt can be a foundation for policy innovations that enhance enterprise agility.

Culture transformation

Widespread understanding the distinction between exogenous and endogenous technical debt is helpful in controlling blaming behavior that targets the engineering teams responsible for developing and maintaining technological assets.

Understanding of asset-exogenous technical debt helps non-engineers understand how their actions and decisions can lead to technical debt formation, even when there is no apparent direct connection between those actions or decisions and the assets in question.

Resource allocation

Data about the technical debt creation effects of enterprise activities is helpful in allocating technical debt retirement costs. For example, when we know all the implications of reorganization, including its impact on internal data about the enterprise itself, we can charge data-related activity to the reorganization instead of to general accounts of the Information Technology function. This helps the enterprise understand the true costs of reorganization.

Similarly, data about enterprise-exogenous technical debt helps planners understand how to deploy resources to gather external intelligence about trends that can affect internal assets. Such data is also useful for setting levels of support and participation in industrial standards organizations or in lobbying government officials.

Knowing the formation history of exogenous technical debt provides useful guidance for those charged with allocating the costs of retiring technical debt or preventing its formation.

References

[Humble 2010] Jez Humble and David Farley. Continuous delivery: reliable software releases through build, test, and deployment automation, Pearson Education, 2010.

Cited in:

[Meadows 1997] Donella H. Meadows. “Places to Intervene in a System,” Whole Earth, Winter 1997.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 28, 2018

Cited in:

[Meadows 1999] Donella H. Meadows. “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System,” Hartland VT: The Sustainability Institute, 1999.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 2, 2018.

Cited in:

[Meadows 2008] Donella H. Meadows and Diana Wright. Thinking in Systems: A Primer. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[Rittel 1973] Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning”, Policy Sciences 4, 1973, 155-169.

Available: here; Retrieved: October 16, 2018

Cited in:

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Malfeasance can be a source of technical debt

Last updated on April 29th, 2018 at 06:36 am

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
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.

Available: here; Retrieved: March 16, 2017

Also cited in:

[Babiak 2007] Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare. Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. ISBN:978-0-06-114789-0

An accessible and authoritative overview of organizational psychopathy. Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[Humble 2010] Jez Humble and David Farley. Continuous delivery: reliable software releases through build, test, and deployment automation, Pearson Education, 2010.

Cited in:

[Meadows 1997] Donella H. Meadows. “Places to Intervene in a System,” Whole Earth, Winter 1997.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 28, 2018

Cited in:

[Meadows 1999] Donella H. Meadows. “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System,” Hartland VT: The Sustainability Institute, 1999.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 2, 2018.

Cited in:

[Meadows 2008] Donella H. Meadows and Diana Wright. Thinking in Systems: A Primer. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[Morse 2004] Gardiner Morse. “Executive psychopaths,” Harvard Business Review, 82:10, 20-22, 2004.

Available: here; Retrieved: April 25, 2018

Cited in:

[Rittel 1973] Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning”, Policy Sciences 4, 1973, 155-169.

Available: here; Retrieved: October 16, 2018

Cited in:

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The Broken Windows theory of technical debt is broken

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
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.

Available: here; Retrieved: March 16, 2017

Also cited in:

[Babiak 2007] Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare. Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. ISBN:978-0-06-114789-0

An accessible and authoritative overview of organizational psychopathy. Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[Gladwell 2000] Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2000.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 26, 2017

Cited in:

[Humble 2010] Jez Humble and David Farley. Continuous delivery: reliable software releases through build, test, and deployment automation, Pearson Education, 2010.

Cited in:

[Hunt 1999] Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[Kelling 1982] Kelling, George L. and James Q. Wilson. “Broken Windows: The police and neighborhood safety,” The Atlantic, 249(3):29–38, March 1982.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[Meadows 1997] Donella H. Meadows. “Places to Intervene in a System,” Whole Earth, Winter 1997.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 28, 2018

Cited in:

[Meadows 1999] Donella H. Meadows. “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System,” Hartland VT: The Sustainability Institute, 1999.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 2, 2018.

Cited in:

[Meadows 2008] Donella H. Meadows and Diana Wright. Thinking in Systems: A Primer. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[Morse 2004] Gardiner Morse. “Executive psychopaths,” Harvard Business Review, 82:10, 20-22, 2004.

Available: here; Retrieved: April 25, 2018

Cited in:

[Note a] Articles and blog entries about applying Broken Windows to managing technical debt in software:

[Tuin 2012] Richard Tuin. “Software Development and the Broken Windows Theory,” blog entry at rtuin.nl, August 22, 2012.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017.

Cited in:

[Matfield 2014] Kat Matfield. “The Broken Windows Theory of Technical Debt,” Mind the Product blog at MindTheProduct.com, November 11, 2014.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[El-Geish 2015] Mohamed El-Geish. “Broken Windows: Software Entropy and Technical Debt,” blog at LinkedIn.com, March 6, 2015

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[Pietola 2012] Mikko Pietola. “Technical Excellence In Agile Software Projects,” Master’s Thesis, Information Technology, Oulu University of Applied Sciences, 2012.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017.

Cited in:

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017.

Cited in:

[O’Brien 2015] [

Cited in:

[Childress 2016] Sarah Childress. “The Problem with ‘Broken Windows’ Policing,” PBS FrontLine, June 28, 2016.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

Cited in:

[O’Brien 2015] [

Cited in:

[Rittel 1973] Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning”, Policy Sciences 4, 1973, 155-169.

Available: here; Retrieved: October 16, 2018

Cited in:

Other posts in this thread

Posted on

The Tragedy of the Commons is a distraction

Last updated on July 24th, 2018 at 08:19 pm

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. This is the kind of “common” referred to in the tragedy of the commons.
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 Commons
The 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.

Available: here; Retrieved: March 16, 2017

Also cited in:

[Babiak 2007] Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare. Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. ISBN:978-0-06-114789-0

An accessible and authoritative overview of organizational psychopathy. Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved December 29, 2016.

Cited in:

[Brenner 2016b] Richard Brenner. “Some Causes of Scope Creep,” Point Lookout 2:36, September 4, 2002.

Available here; Retrieved December 30, 2016.

Cited in:

[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.

Available here; Retrieved December 29, 2016.

Cited in:

[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.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.

Available here; Retrieved: March 10, 2017.

Cited in:

[Gladwell 2000] Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2000.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 26, 2017

Cited in:

[Hardin 1968] Garrett Hardin. “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, 162, 1243-1248 1968.

Available: here; Retrieved December 29, 2016.

Cited in:

[Hardin 1998] Garrett Hardin. “Extensions of ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’,” Science, May 1, 1998: Vol. 280, Issue 5364, 682-683.

Available: here; Retrieved: July 30, 2017

Cited in:

[Humble 2010] Jez Humble and David Farley. Continuous delivery: reliable software releases through build, test, and deployment automation, Pearson Education, 2010.

Cited in:

[Hunt 1999] Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[Kelling 1982] Kelling, George L. and James Q. Wilson. “Broken Windows: The police and neighborhood safety,” The Atlantic, 249(3):29–38, March 1982.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[Kim 2011] Daniel H. Kim and Virginia Anderson. Systems Archetype Basics: From Story to Structure, Waltham, Massachusetts: Pegasus Communications, Inc., 2011

Available: here; Retrieved: July 4, 2017 Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[Lloyd 1833] Lloyd, W. F. Two Lectures on the Checks to Population, 1833.

Available: here; Retrieved: July 30, 2017

Cited in:

[Meadows 1997] Donella H. Meadows. “Places to Intervene in a System,” Whole Earth, Winter 1997.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 28, 2018

Cited in:

[Meadows 1999] Donella H. Meadows. “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System,” Hartland VT: The Sustainability Institute, 1999.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 2, 2018.

Cited in:

[Meadows 2008] Donella H. Meadows and Diana Wright. Thinking in Systems: A Primer. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.”

Cited in:

[Morse 2004] Gardiner Morse. “Executive psychopaths,” Harvard Business Review, 82:10, 20-22, 2004.

Available: here; Retrieved: April 25, 2018

Cited in:

[Note a] Articles and blog entries about applying Broken Windows to managing technical debt in software:

[Tuin 2012] Richard Tuin. “Software Development and the Broken Windows Theory,” blog entry at rtuin.nl, August 22, 2012.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017.

Cited in:

[Matfield 2014] Kat Matfield. “The Broken Windows Theory of Technical Debt,” Mind the Product blog at MindTheProduct.com, November 11, 2014.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[El-Geish 2015] Mohamed El-Geish. “Broken Windows: Software Entropy and Technical Debt,” blog at LinkedIn.com, March 6, 2015

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[Pietola 2012] Mikko Pietola. “Technical Excellence In Agile Software Projects,” Master’s Thesis, Information Technology, Oulu University of Applied Sciences, 2012.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017.

Cited in:

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017.

Cited in:

[O’Brien 2015] [

Cited in:

[Childress 2016] Sarah Childress. “The Problem with ‘Broken Windows’ Policing,” PBS FrontLine, June 28, 2016.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

Cited in:

[O’Brien 2015] [

Cited in:

[Ostrom 1990] Elinor Ostrom. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Cited in:

[Ostrom 2009] Elinor Ostrom. “Beyond the tragedy of commons,” Stockholm whiteboard seminars.

Video, 8:26 min. Apr 3, 2009. here; Retrieved December 29, 2016.

Cited in:

[Rittel 1973] Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning”, Policy Sciences 4, 1973, 155-169.

Available: here; Retrieved: October 16, 2018

Cited in:

Other posts in this thread

Posted on

Contract restrictions can lead to technical debt

Last updated on March 22nd, 2018 at 11:18 pm

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.
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.

Available: here; Retrieved: March 16, 2017

Also cited in:

[Babiak 2007] Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare. Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. ISBN:978-0-06-114789-0

An accessible and authoritative overview of organizational psychopathy. Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved December 29, 2016.

Cited in:

[Brenner 2016b] Richard Brenner. “Some Causes of Scope Creep,” Point Lookout 2:36, September 4, 2002.

Available here; Retrieved December 30, 2016.

Cited in:

[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.

Available here; Retrieved December 29, 2016.

Cited in:

[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.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.

Available here; Retrieved: March 10, 2017.

Cited in:

[Gladwell 2000] Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2000.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 26, 2017

Cited in:

[Hardin 1968] Garrett Hardin. “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, 162, 1243-1248 1968.

Available: here; Retrieved December 29, 2016.

Cited in:

[Hardin 1998] Garrett Hardin. “Extensions of ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’,” Science, May 1, 1998: Vol. 280, Issue 5364, 682-683.

Available: here; Retrieved: July 30, 2017

Cited in:

[Humble 2010] Jez Humble and David Farley. Continuous delivery: reliable software releases through build, test, and deployment automation, Pearson Education, 2010.

Cited in:

[Hunt 1999] Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[Kelling 1982] Kelling, George L. and James Q. Wilson. “Broken Windows: The police and neighborhood safety,” The Atlantic, 249(3):29–38, March 1982.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[Kim 2011] Daniel H. Kim and Virginia Anderson. Systems Archetype Basics: From Story to Structure, Waltham, Massachusetts: Pegasus Communications, Inc., 2011

Available: here; Retrieved: July 4, 2017 Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[Lloyd 1833] Lloyd, W. F. Two Lectures on the Checks to Population, 1833.

Available: here; Retrieved: July 30, 2017

Cited in:

[Meadows 1997] Donella H. Meadows. “Places to Intervene in a System,” Whole Earth, Winter 1997.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 28, 2018

Cited in:

[Meadows 1999] Donella H. Meadows. “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System,” Hartland VT: The Sustainability Institute, 1999.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 2, 2018.

Cited in:

[Meadows 2008] Donella H. Meadows and Diana Wright. Thinking in Systems: A Primer. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.”

Cited in:

[Morse 2004] Gardiner Morse. “Executive psychopaths,” Harvard Business Review, 82:10, 20-22, 2004.

Available: here; Retrieved: April 25, 2018

Cited in:

[Note a] Articles and blog entries about applying Broken Windows to managing technical debt in software:

[Tuin 2012] Richard Tuin. “Software Development and the Broken Windows Theory,” blog entry at rtuin.nl, August 22, 2012.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017.

Cited in:

[Matfield 2014] Kat Matfield. “The Broken Windows Theory of Technical Debt,” Mind the Product blog at MindTheProduct.com, November 11, 2014.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[El-Geish 2015] Mohamed El-Geish. “Broken Windows: Software Entropy and Technical Debt,” blog at LinkedIn.com, March 6, 2015

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[Pietola 2012] Mikko Pietola. “Technical Excellence In Agile Software Projects,” Master’s Thesis, Information Technology, Oulu University of Applied Sciences, 2012.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017.

Cited in:

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017.

Cited in:

[O’Brien 2015] [

Cited in:

[Childress 2016] Sarah Childress. “The Problem with ‘Broken Windows’ Policing,” PBS FrontLine, June 28, 2016.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

Cited in:

[O’Brien 2015] [

Cited in:

[Ostrom 1990] Elinor Ostrom. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Cited in:

[Ostrom 2009] Elinor Ostrom. “Beyond the tragedy of commons,” Stockholm whiteboard seminars.

Video, 8:26 min. Apr 3, 2009. here; Retrieved December 29, 2016.

Cited in:

[Rittel 1973] Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning”, Policy Sciences 4, 1973, 155-169.

Available: here; Retrieved: October 16, 2018

Cited in:

Other posts in this thread

Posted on

How budget depletion leads to technical debt

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
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 USACE
Here’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.

Available: here; Retrieved: March 16, 2017

Also cited in:

[Babiak 2007] Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare. Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. ISBN:978-0-06-114789-0

An accessible and authoritative overview of organizational psychopathy. Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved December 29, 2016.

Cited in:

[Brenner 2016b] Richard Brenner. “Some Causes of Scope Creep,” Point Lookout 2:36, September 4, 2002.

Available here; Retrieved December 30, 2016.

Cited in:

[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.

Available here; Retrieved December 29, 2016.

Cited in:

[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.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.

Available here; Retrieved: March 10, 2017.

Cited in:

[Gladwell 2000] Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2000.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 26, 2017

Cited in:

[Hardin 1968] Garrett Hardin. “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, 162, 1243-1248 1968.

Available: here; Retrieved December 29, 2016.

Cited in:

[Hardin 1998] Garrett Hardin. “Extensions of ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’,” Science, May 1, 1998: Vol. 280, Issue 5364, 682-683.

Available: here; Retrieved: July 30, 2017

Cited in:

[Humble 2010] Jez Humble and David Farley. Continuous delivery: reliable software releases through build, test, and deployment automation, Pearson Education, 2010.

Cited in:

[Hunt 1999] Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[Kelling 1982] Kelling, George L. and James Q. Wilson. “Broken Windows: The police and neighborhood safety,” The Atlantic, 249(3):29–38, March 1982.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[Kim 2011] Daniel H. Kim and Virginia Anderson. Systems Archetype Basics: From Story to Structure, Waltham, Massachusetts: Pegasus Communications, Inc., 2011

Available: here; Retrieved: July 4, 2017 Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[Lloyd 1833] Lloyd, W. F. Two Lectures on the Checks to Population, 1833.

Available: here; Retrieved: July 30, 2017

Cited in:

[MacFee 1987] John MacFee. “Atchafalaya,” The New Yorker, February 23, 1987.

Available: here; Retrieved: February 5, 2018.

Cited in:

[Meadows 1997] Donella H. Meadows. “Places to Intervene in a System,” Whole Earth, Winter 1997.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 28, 2018

Cited in:

[Meadows 1999] Donella H. Meadows. “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System,” Hartland VT: The Sustainability Institute, 1999.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 2, 2018.

Cited in:

[Meadows 2008] Donella H. Meadows and Diana Wright. Thinking in Systems: A Primer. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.”

Cited in:

[Morse 2004] Gardiner Morse. “Executive psychopaths,” Harvard Business Review, 82:10, 20-22, 2004.

Available: here; Retrieved: April 25, 2018

Cited in:

[Note a] Articles and blog entries about applying Broken Windows to managing technical debt in software:

[Tuin 2012] Richard Tuin. “Software Development and the Broken Windows Theory,” blog entry at rtuin.nl, August 22, 2012.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017.

Cited in:

[Matfield 2014] Kat Matfield. “The Broken Windows Theory of Technical Debt,” Mind the Product blog at MindTheProduct.com, November 11, 2014.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[El-Geish 2015] Mohamed El-Geish. “Broken Windows: Software Entropy and Technical Debt,” blog at LinkedIn.com, March 6, 2015

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[Pietola 2012] Mikko Pietola. “Technical Excellence In Agile Software Projects,” Master’s Thesis, Information Technology, Oulu University of Applied Sciences, 2012.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017.

Cited in:

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017.

Cited in:

[O’Brien 2015] [

Cited in:

[Childress 2016] Sarah Childress. “The Problem with ‘Broken Windows’ Policing,” PBS FrontLine, June 28, 2016.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

Cited in:

[O’Brien 2015] [

Cited in:

[Ostrom 1990] Elinor Ostrom. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Cited in:

[Ostrom 2009] Elinor Ostrom. “Beyond the tragedy of commons,” Stockholm whiteboard seminars.

Video, 8:26 min. Apr 3, 2009. here; Retrieved December 29, 2016.

Cited in:

[Rittel 1973] Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning”, Policy Sciences 4, 1973, 155-169.

Available: here; Retrieved: October 16, 2018

Cited in:

Other posts in this thread

Posted on

How outsourcing leads to increasing technical debt

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
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.

Available: here; Retrieved: March 16, 2017

Also cited in:

[Babiak 2007] Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare. Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. ISBN:978-0-06-114789-0

An accessible and authoritative overview of organizational psychopathy. Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[Beardsell 2010] Julie Beardsell. “IT Backsourcing: is it the solution to innovation?”, SMC Working Paper Series, Issue: 02/2010, Swiss Management Center University, 2010.

Available: here; Retrieved: February 15, 2018

Cited in:

[Boehm 2016] Barry Boehm, Celia Chen, Kamonphop Srisopha, Reem Alfayez, and Lin Shiy. “Avoiding Non-Technical Sources of Software Maintenance Technical Debt,” USC Course notes, Fall 2016.

Available: here; Retrieved: July 25, 2017

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved December 29, 2016.

Cited in:

[Brenner 2016b] Richard Brenner. “Some Causes of Scope Creep,” Point Lookout 2:36, September 4, 2002.

Available here; Retrieved December 30, 2016.

Cited in:

[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.

Available here; Retrieved December 29, 2016.

Cited in:

[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.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.

Available here; Retrieved: March 10, 2017.

Cited in:

[Gladwell 2000] Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2000.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 26, 2017

Cited in:

[Hardin 1968] Garrett Hardin. “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, 162, 1243-1248 1968.

Available: here; Retrieved December 29, 2016.

Cited in:

[Hardin 1998] Garrett Hardin. “Extensions of ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’,” Science, May 1, 1998: Vol. 280, Issue 5364, 682-683.

Available: here; Retrieved: July 30, 2017

Cited in:

[Humble 2010] Jez Humble and David Farley. Continuous delivery: reliable software releases through build, test, and deployment automation, Pearson Education, 2010.

Cited in:

[Hunt 1999] Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[Kelling 1982] Kelling, George L. and James Q. Wilson. “Broken Windows: The police and neighborhood safety,” The Atlantic, 249(3):29–38, March 1982.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[Kim 2011] Daniel H. Kim and Virginia Anderson. Systems Archetype Basics: From Story to Structure, Waltham, Massachusetts: Pegasus Communications, Inc., 2011

Available: here; Retrieved: July 4, 2017 Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.

Cited in:

[Kusnet 2007] David Kusnet. “Highway Robbery II,” report of the National Association of State Highway and Transportation Unions (NASHTU).

Cited in:

[Laplante 2007] Phillip A. Laplante. What Every Engineer Should Know About Software Engineering. New York: CRC Press, 2007.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.

Cited in:

[Lloyd 1833] Lloyd, W. F. Two Lectures on the Checks to Population, 1833.

Available: here; Retrieved: July 30, 2017

Cited in:

[MacFee 1987] John MacFee. “Atchafalaya,” The New Yorker, February 23, 1987.

Available: here; Retrieved: February 5, 2018.

Cited in:

[Meadows 1997] Donella H. Meadows. “Places to Intervene in a System,” Whole Earth, Winter 1997.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 28, 2018

Cited in:

[Meadows 1999] Donella H. Meadows. “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System,” Hartland VT: The Sustainability Institute, 1999.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 2, 2018.

Cited in:

[Meadows 2008] Donella H. Meadows and Diana Wright. Thinking in Systems: A Primer. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.”

Cited in:

[Morse 2004] Gardiner Morse. “Executive psychopaths,” Harvard Business Review, 82:10, 20-22, 2004.

Available: here; Retrieved: April 25, 2018

Cited in:

[Note a] Articles and blog entries about applying Broken Windows to managing technical debt in software:

[Tuin 2012] Richard Tuin. “Software Development and the Broken Windows Theory,” blog entry at rtuin.nl, August 22, 2012.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017.

Cited in:

[Matfield 2014] Kat Matfield. “The Broken Windows Theory of Technical Debt,” Mind the Product blog at MindTheProduct.com, November 11, 2014.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[El-Geish 2015] Mohamed El-Geish. “Broken Windows: Software Entropy and Technical Debt,” blog at LinkedIn.com, March 6, 2015

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[Pietola 2012] Mikko Pietola. “Technical Excellence In Agile Software Projects,” Master’s Thesis, Information Technology, Oulu University of Applied Sciences, 2012.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017.

Cited in:

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017.

Cited in:

[O’Brien 2015] [

Cited in:

[Childress 2016] Sarah Childress. “The Problem with ‘Broken Windows’ Policing,” PBS FrontLine, June 28, 2016.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

Cited in:

[O’Brien 2015] [

Cited in:

[Ostrom 1990] Elinor Ostrom. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Cited in:

[Ostrom 2009] Elinor Ostrom. “Beyond the tragedy of commons,” Stockholm whiteboard seminars.

Video, 8:26 min. Apr 3, 2009. here; Retrieved December 29, 2016.

Cited in:

[Rittel 1973] Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning”, Policy Sciences 4, 1973, 155-169.

Available: here; Retrieved: October 16, 2018

Cited in:

[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.

Cited in:

Other posts in this thread

Posted on

Confirmation bias and technical debt

Confirmation bias is a cognitive bias [Kahneman 2011]. It’s the human tendency to favor and seek only information that confirms our preconceptions, or to avoid information that disconfirms them. For example, the homogeneity of cable news channel audiences, and the alignment between preconceptions of the audience and the slant of the newscast for that channel, are results of confirmation bias.

Third stage ignition, sending the Mars Climate Orbiter (MCO) to Mars in December, 1998
Computer-generated image of the third stage ignition, sending the Mars Climate Orbiter (MCO) to Mars in December, 1998. The spacecraft eventually broke up in the Martian atmosphere as a result of what is now often called the “metric mix-up.” The team at Lockheed Martin that constructed the spacecraft and wrote its software used Imperial units for computing thrust data. But the team at JPL that was responsible for flying the spacecraft was using metric units. The mix-up was discovered after the loss of the spacecraft by the investigation panel established by NASA.
One of the many operational changes deployed as a result of this loss was increased use of reviews and inspections. While we do not know why reviews and inspections weren’t as thorough before the loss of the MCO as they are now, one possibility is the effects of confirmation bias in assessing the need for reviews and inspections. Image courtesy Engineering Multimedia, Inc., and U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Confirmation bias causes technical debt by biasing the information on which decision makers base decisions involving technical debt. Most people in these roles have objectives they regard as having priority over eliminating technical debt. This causes them to bias their searches for information about technical debt in favor of information that would support directly the achievement of those primary objectives. They tend, for example, to discount warnings of technical debt issues, to underfund technical debt assessments, and to set aside advice regarding avoiding debt formation in current projects.

For example, anyone determined to find reasons to be skeptical of the need to manage technical debt need only execute a few Google searches. Searching for there is no such thing as technical debt yields about 300,000 results at this writing; technical debt is a fraud about 1.6 million; and technical debt is a bad metaphor about 3.7 million. Compare this to technical debt which yields only 1.6 million. A skeptic wouldn’t even have to read any of these pages to come away convinced that technical debt is at best a controversial concept. This is, of course, specious reasoning, if it’s reasoning at all. But it does serve to illustrate the potential for confirmation bias to contribute to preventing or limiting rational management of technical debt.

Detecting confirmation bias in oneself is extraordinarily difficult because confirmation bias causes us to (a) decide not to search for data that would reveal confirmation bias; and (b) if data somehow becomes available, to disregard or to seek alternative explanations for it if that data tends to confirm the existence of confirmation bias. Moreover, another cognitive bias known as the bias blind spot causes individuals to see the existence and effects of cognitive biases much more in others than in themselves [Pronin 2002].

Still, the enterprise would benefit from monitoring the possible existence and effects of confirmation bias in decisions with respect to allocating resources to managing technical debt. Whenever decisions are made, we must manage confirmation bias risk.

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.

Available: here; Retrieved: March 16, 2017

Also cited in:

[Babiak 2007] Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare. Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. ISBN:978-0-06-114789-0

An accessible and authoritative overview of organizational psychopathy. Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[Beardsell 2010] Julie Beardsell. “IT Backsourcing: is it the solution to innovation?”, SMC Working Paper Series, Issue: 02/2010, Swiss Management Center University, 2010.

Available: here; Retrieved: February 15, 2018

Cited in:

[Boehm 2016] Barry Boehm, Celia Chen, Kamonphop Srisopha, Reem Alfayez, and Lin Shiy. “Avoiding Non-Technical Sources of Software Maintenance Technical Debt,” USC Course notes, Fall 2016.

Available: here; Retrieved: July 25, 2017

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved December 29, 2016.

Cited in:

[Brenner 2016b] Richard Brenner. “Some Causes of Scope Creep,” Point Lookout 2:36, September 4, 2002.

Available here; Retrieved December 30, 2016.

Cited in:

[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.

Available here; Retrieved December 29, 2016.

Cited in:

[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.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.

Available here; Retrieved: March 10, 2017.

Cited in:

[Gladwell 2000] Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2000.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 26, 2017

Cited in:

[Hardin 1968] Garrett Hardin. “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, 162, 1243-1248 1968.

Available: here; Retrieved December 29, 2016.

Cited in:

[Hardin 1998] Garrett Hardin. “Extensions of ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’,” Science, May 1, 1998: Vol. 280, Issue 5364, 682-683.

Available: here; Retrieved: July 30, 2017

Cited in:

[Humble 2010] Jez Humble and David Farley. Continuous delivery: reliable software releases through build, test, and deployment automation, Pearson Education, 2010.

Cited in:

[Hunt 1999] Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[Kahneman 2011] Daniel Kahneman. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Macmillan, 2011.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[Kelling 1982] Kelling, George L. and James Q. Wilson. “Broken Windows: The police and neighborhood safety,” The Atlantic, 249(3):29–38, March 1982.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[Kim 2011] Daniel H. Kim and Virginia Anderson. Systems Archetype Basics: From Story to Structure, Waltham, Massachusetts: Pegasus Communications, Inc., 2011

Available: here; Retrieved: July 4, 2017 Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.

Cited in:

[Kusnet 2007] David Kusnet. “Highway Robbery II,” report of the National Association of State Highway and Transportation Unions (NASHTU).

Cited in:

[Laplante 2007] Phillip A. Laplante. What Every Engineer Should Know About Software Engineering. New York: CRC Press, 2007.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.

Cited in:

[Lloyd 1833] Lloyd, W. F. Two Lectures on the Checks to Population, 1833.

Available: here; Retrieved: July 30, 2017

Cited in:

[MacFee 1987] John MacFee. “Atchafalaya,” The New Yorker, February 23, 1987.

Available: here; Retrieved: February 5, 2018.

Cited in:

[Meadows 1997] Donella H. Meadows. “Places to Intervene in a System,” Whole Earth, Winter 1997.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 28, 2018

Cited in:

[Meadows 1999] Donella H. Meadows. “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System,” Hartland VT: The Sustainability Institute, 1999.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 2, 2018.

Cited in:

[Meadows 2008] Donella H. Meadows and Diana Wright. Thinking in Systems: A Primer. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.”

Cited in:

[Morse 2004] Gardiner Morse. “Executive psychopaths,” Harvard Business Review, 82:10, 20-22, 2004.

Available: here; Retrieved: April 25, 2018

Cited in:

[Note a] Articles and blog entries about applying Broken Windows to managing technical debt in software:

[Tuin 2012] Richard Tuin. “Software Development and the Broken Windows Theory,” blog entry at rtuin.nl, August 22, 2012.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017.

Cited in:

[Matfield 2014] Kat Matfield. “The Broken Windows Theory of Technical Debt,” Mind the Product blog at MindTheProduct.com, November 11, 2014.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[El-Geish 2015] Mohamed El-Geish. “Broken Windows: Software Entropy and Technical Debt,” blog at LinkedIn.com, March 6, 2015

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[Pietola 2012] Mikko Pietola. “Technical Excellence In Agile Software Projects,” Master’s Thesis, Information Technology, Oulu University of Applied Sciences, 2012.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017.

Cited in:

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017.

Cited in:

[O’Brien 2015] [

Cited in:

[Childress 2016] Sarah Childress. “The Problem with ‘Broken Windows’ Policing,” PBS FrontLine, June 28, 2016.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

Cited in:

[O’Brien 2015] [

Cited in:

[Ostrom 1990] Elinor Ostrom. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Cited in:

[Ostrom 2009] Elinor Ostrom. “Beyond the tragedy of commons,” Stockholm whiteboard seminars.

Video, 8:26 min. Apr 3, 2009. here; Retrieved December 29, 2016.

Cited in:

[Pronin 2002] Emily Pronin, Daniel Y. Lin, and Lee Ross. “The bias blind spot: Perceptions of bias in self versus others.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28:3, 369-381, 2002.

Available: here; Retrieved: July 10, 2017

Cited in:

[Rittel 1973] Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning”, Policy Sciences 4, 1973, 155-169.

Available: here; Retrieved: October 16, 2018

Cited in:

[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.

Cited in:

Other posts in this thread

Posted on

Unrealistic optimism: the planning fallacy and the n-person prisoner’s dilemma

Last updated on September 20th, 2018 at 03:51 pm

In a 1977 report, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky identify one particular cognitive bias [Kahneman 2011], the planning fallacy, which afflicts planners [Kahneman 1977] [Kahneman 1979]. They discuss two types of information planners use. Singular information is specific to the case at hand; distributional information is drawn from similar past efforts. The planning fallacy is the tendency of planners to pay too little attention to distributional evidence and too much to singular evidence, even when the singular evidence is scanty or questionable. Failing to harvest lessons from the distributional evidence, which is inherently more diverse than singular evidence, the planners tend to underestimate cost and schedule. So for any given project, there’s an inherent tendency in human behavior to promise lower costs, faster delivery, and greater benefits than anyone can reasonably expect.

Aerial view of Hoover Dam, September 2017
Aerial view of Hoover Dam, September 2017. Under construction from 1931 to 1936, the dam was built for $48.8M ($639M in 2016 dollars) under a fixed-price contract. It was completed two years ahead of schedule. Apparently the planning fallacy doesn’t act inevitably. 112 men died in incidents associated with its construction. 42 more died of a condition diagnosed as pneumonia, but which is now thought to have been carbon monoxide poisoning due to poor ventilation in the dam’s diversion tunnels during construction. There’s little doubt that unrealistic optimism affects not only projections of budget and schedule, but also projections of risks, including deaths. Photo (cc) Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz), courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
But the problem is exacerbated by a dynamic described by Boehm et al. [Boehm 2016], who observe that because organizational resources are finite, project sponsors compete with each other for resources. They’re compelled by this competition to be unrealistically optimistic about their objectives, costs, and schedules. Although Boehm et al. call this mechanism the “Conspiracy of Optimism,” possibly facetiously, it isn’t actually a conspiracy. Rather, it’s a variant of the N-Person Prisoner’s Dilemma [Hamburger 1973].

Unrealistic optimism creates budget shortfalls and schedule pressures, both of which contribute to conditions favorable for creating non-strategic technical debt. And the kinds of technical debt produced by this mechanism, or any mechanism associated with schedule or budget pressure, tend to be subtle — they’re the types least likely to become evident in the short term. For example, technical debt that might make a particular kind of enhancement more difficult in the next project is more likely to appear than technical debt in the form of a copy of some code that should have been replaced by a utility routine. Copies of code are more easily discovered and more likely to be retired in the short term, if not in the current project. Awkward architecture might be more difficult to identify, and is therefore more likely to survive in the intermediate or long term.

In other words, the forms of technical debt most likely to be generated are those that are the most benign in the short term, and which are therefore more likely to escape notice. If noticed, they’re more likely to be forgotten unless carefully documented, an action that’s unlikely to be taken under conditions of schedule and budget pressure. In this way, the non-strategic technical debt created as a result of unrealistic optimism is more likely than most technical debt to eventually become legacy technical debt.

Policymakers can assist in addressing the consequences of unrealistic optimism by advocating for education about it. They can also advocate for changes in incentive structures and performance management systems to include organizational standards with respect to realism in promised benefits, costs, and schedules.

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.

Available: here; Retrieved: March 16, 2017

Also cited in:

[Babiak 2007] Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare. Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. ISBN:978-0-06-114789-0

An accessible and authoritative overview of organizational psychopathy. Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[Beardsell 2010] Julie Beardsell. “IT Backsourcing: is it the solution to innovation?”, SMC Working Paper Series, Issue: 02/2010, Swiss Management Center University, 2010.

Available: here; Retrieved: February 15, 2018

Cited in:

[Boehm 2016] Barry Boehm, Celia Chen, Kamonphop Srisopha, Reem Alfayez, and Lin Shiy. “Avoiding Non-Technical Sources of Software Maintenance Technical Debt,” USC Course notes, Fall 2016.

Available: here; Retrieved: July 25, 2017

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved December 29, 2016.

Cited in:

[Brenner 2016b] Richard Brenner. “Some Causes of Scope Creep,” Point Lookout 2:36, September 4, 2002.

Available here; Retrieved December 30, 2016.

Cited in:

[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.

Available here; Retrieved December 29, 2016.

Cited in:

[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.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.

Available here; Retrieved: March 10, 2017.

Cited in:

[Gladwell 2000] Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2000.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[Hamburger 1973] Henry Hamburger. “N-person Prisoner’s Dilemma,” Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 3, 27–48, 1973. doi:10.1080/0022250X.1973.9989822

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 26, 2017

Cited in:

[Hardin 1968] Garrett Hardin. “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, 162, 1243-1248 1968.

Available: here; Retrieved December 29, 2016.

Cited in:

[Hardin 1998] Garrett Hardin. “Extensions of ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’,” Science, May 1, 1998: Vol. 280, Issue 5364, 682-683.

Available: here; Retrieved: July 30, 2017

Cited in:

[Humble 2010] Jez Humble and David Farley. Continuous delivery: reliable software releases through build, test, and deployment automation, Pearson Education, 2010.

Cited in:

[Hunt 1999] Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[Kahneman 1977] Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. “Intuitive Prediction: Biases and Corrective Procedures,” Technical Report PTR-1042-7746, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, June 1977.

Available: here; Retrieved: September 19, 2017

Cited in:

[Kahneman 1979] Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Intuitive Prediction: Biases and Corrective Procedures,” Management Science 12, 313-327, 1979.

Cited in:

[Kahneman 2011] Daniel Kahneman. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Macmillan, 2011.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[Kelling 1982] Kelling, George L. and James Q. Wilson. “Broken Windows: The police and neighborhood safety,” The Atlantic, 249(3):29–38, March 1982.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[Kim 2011] Daniel H. Kim and Virginia Anderson. Systems Archetype Basics: From Story to Structure, Waltham, Massachusetts: Pegasus Communications, Inc., 2011

Available: here; Retrieved: July 4, 2017 Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.

Cited in:

[Kusnet 2007] David Kusnet. “Highway Robbery II,” report of the National Association of State Highway and Transportation Unions (NASHTU).

Cited in:

[Laplante 2007] Phillip A. Laplante. What Every Engineer Should Know About Software Engineering. New York: CRC Press, 2007.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.

Cited in:

[Lloyd 1833] Lloyd, W. F. Two Lectures on the Checks to Population, 1833.

Available: here; Retrieved: July 30, 2017

Cited in:

[MacFee 1987] John MacFee. “Atchafalaya,” The New Yorker, February 23, 1987.

Available: here; Retrieved: February 5, 2018.

Cited in:

[Meadows 1997] Donella H. Meadows. “Places to Intervene in a System,” Whole Earth, Winter 1997.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 28, 2018

Cited in:

[Meadows 1999] Donella H. Meadows. “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System,” Hartland VT: The Sustainability Institute, 1999.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 2, 2018.

Cited in:

[Meadows 2008] Donella H. Meadows and Diana Wright. Thinking in Systems: A Primer. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[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.”

Cited in:

[Morse 2004] Gardiner Morse. “Executive psychopaths,” Harvard Business Review, 82:10, 20-22, 2004.

Available: here; Retrieved: April 25, 2018

Cited in:

[Note a] Articles and blog entries about applying Broken Windows to managing technical debt in software:

[Tuin 2012] Richard Tuin. “Software Development and the Broken Windows Theory,” blog entry at rtuin.nl, August 22, 2012.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017.

Cited in:

[Matfield 2014] Kat Matfield. “The Broken Windows Theory of Technical Debt,” Mind the Product blog at MindTheProduct.com, November 11, 2014.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[El-Geish 2015] Mohamed El-Geish. “Broken Windows: Software Entropy and Technical Debt,” blog at LinkedIn.com, March 6, 2015

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[Pietola 2012] Mikko Pietola. “Technical Excellence In Agile Software Projects,” Master’s Thesis, Information Technology, Oulu University of Applied Sciences, 2012.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017.

Cited in:

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017.

Cited in:

[O’Brien 2015] [

Cited in:

[Childress 2016] Sarah Childress. “The Problem with ‘Broken Windows’ Policing,” PBS FrontLine, June 28, 2016.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

[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.

Available: here; Retrieved: June 25, 2017

Cited in:

Cited in:

[O’Brien 2015] [

Cited in:

[Ostrom 1990] Elinor Ostrom. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Cited in:

[Ostrom 2009] Elinor Ostrom. “Beyond the tragedy of commons,” Stockholm whiteboard seminars.

Video, 8:26 min. Apr 3, 2009. here; Retrieved December 29, 2016.

Cited in:

[Pronin 2002] Emily Pronin, Daniel Y. Lin, and Lee Ross. “The bias blind spot: Perceptions of bias in self versus others.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28:3, 369-381, 2002.

Available: here; Retrieved: July 10, 2017

Cited in:

[Rittel 1973] Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning”, Policy Sciences 4, 1973, 155-169.

Available: here; Retrieved: October 16, 2018

Cited in:

[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.

Cited in:

Other posts in this thread

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