![]() What is the fine line differentiating “acceptably maintained” code from toxic code? I don’t think I have conducted a large enough sample of technical debt assessments to provide a statistically significant answer. Take a look at the warehousing and distribution services offered by Amazon to get a sense of what this kind of additional services could do for your core business: they will enable you to transform your current business design by adding an Online-to-Offline (O2O) component to it. Nor would you be able to wrap additional services around decaying legacy code. You certainly will not be able to get it to interoperate with mobile and social networking applications, let alone offer it in the form of cloud services. Through cloud it will enable you to offer these very same products and many others as services.Ĭonversely, if you consistently neglect to pay back your technical debt, your legacy code is likely to collapse due to the effects of software decay.Through mobile and social your legacy software will enable you to flexibly produce, market and distribute small quantities of whatever your products might need to be in niche markets.If you maintain it to an acceptable level, it can become the core of two major benefits of much higher connectivity and connectedness in the not-too-far future: In the context of current trends in cloud, mobile and social, your legacy software is like the West Side Highway in New York City. As a matter of fact, it is quite likely to come through a confluence of the three: Cloud, Mobile and Social. The enhanced connectivity might come through mobile applications, through social networks or through the cloud. Whether you do or do not fully subscribe to the vision of the Internet-of-Things depicted in the figure below, it is fairly safe to assume that your business in the years to come will be much more connected to the outside world than it is now. This sensation is not so much about what happened (see The Real Cost of a One Trillion Dollars in IT Debt: Part II – The Performance Paradox for an explanation of the economics of the neglect of software maintenance during the past decade), but about the company for which I do the assessment giving up on immense forthcoming opportunities. Nowadays I often have a deja vu sensation in various technical debt engagements in which I find the code crumbling. I simply could not believe that a highway would be neglected to that extent amidst all the affluence of the city. Many years ago, when I came to the US, I was shocked to the core seeing the collapsed West Side Highway in New York City. ![]()
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