This is part of a series called Eight Questions to Ask About Your Tech Debt
- Introduction
- #1: Visibility, #2: Misalignment, #3: Size, #4: Difficulty, #5: Volatility, #6: Resistance, #7: Regressions, #8: Uncertainty
- Using the Eight Questions
- Planning with the Eight Questions, Part 1, Part 2, & Negative Net Force Projects
The main thing to keep in mind is this diagram (described in the introduction):
It’s not on the diagram, but I do ask one more question when I evaluate tech debt: How much joy would it bring me to fix this code?
I can’t deny that some tech debt is just depressing. Maybe it wouldn’t be the best use of time, but if it’s borderline, I let that feeling nudge it a little. You could also express the opposite feeling (you would hate mucking with this code, even to improve it) by using a Joy score of 0 or 1.
In the spreadsheet I shared in the book, I let you see the net force with and without joy taken into account.
Productivity and joy are closely related. In Chapter 6, I shared this quote about happiness and productivity from Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:
In the course of my studies […] I developed a theory of optimal experience based on the concept of flow—the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.
Fixing tech debt makes the code easier to change, which will lead to more flow, and (according to Csikszentmihalyi) will lead to enjoyable experiences at work. To me, that’s worth taking into account.
But it’s also important to keep Csikszentmihalyi’s warning in mind. If an activity is “so enjoyable,” he wrote, “people will do it even at great cost”. My antidote (if Joy is driving the decision) is to limit the time I work on it or do it when I am given latitude (like in an internal hackathon).