On 08 Feb, Ben Nemec wrote: > So TripleO has a tech debt policy: > https://specs.openstack.org/openstack/tripleo-specs/specs/policy/tech-debt-tracking.html > (and I'm tagging tripleo on this thread for visibility).
I didn't know about this policy. I've been circling around tech debts for more than a month now, and nobody pointed me to it either. Anyway, I find it insufficient. Not specifically the tracking method, but more the guidelines and the example, to understand how to use it correctly. Doing some basic research, I see that in tripleo 31 bugs were marked with tech-debt tag. 15 Were closed, but they were also marked as CRITICAL. This does not match my definition of tech-debt. Of the remaining 16 sometimes it's hard to understand which part is the technical debt, some are really new features requests matching more the feeling "we may have needed to think about this months ago during the design", for some it's just "we don't have a clear idea of what to do" and the rest is "here's a bandaid, we'll think about it later" The policy lacks a definition of what is a technical debt. I understand the issue as it's really difficult to find a unique definition that fits all we want to include. Whatever the definition we want it to be, there are at least three things that I want to see in tech debt bug (or report), and they all try to focus on the "debt" part of the whole "tech debt" concept. - What's the cost of the repayment - What's the cost of the interests - What's the frequency of the interests For me a technical debt is an imperfect implementation that has consequences. Describable and maybe measurable consequences. "I'm using list in this case for simplicity but if we add more items, we may need a more efficient structure, because it will become too slow" The cost of the repayment is the time spent to replace the structure and its methods with something more complex The cost of the interests is the speed lost when the list increases The frequency of the interests is "this list will become very big every three hours" Without these three elements it becomes hard to understand if we want to really repay the debt, and how we prioritize the repayments. Since a tech debt is something that I find really related to the code (Which piece or line of code is the one that has these measurale consequences) I'd really like for the report to be as close as possible to the code. Also sometimes it may just become a design choice based on assumptions. "I know the list is not efficient, but we'll rarely get it big often, and we are sure to clear it out almost immediately" We can maybe discuss further the advantages of the existing bug tracking for the handling of these reports. > I'm not sure I agree. Bugs stay open until they are fixed/won't fixed. Tech > debt stays open until it is fixed/won't fixed. We've had bugs open for > years for things that are tricky to fix. Arguably those are tech debt too, > but in any case I'm not aware of any problems with using the bug tracker to > manage them. Remember the "debt" in "technical debt". You're not reporting it correctly if you don't measure the consequences. I don't think the report should really be about the problem or the solution, because then you're really only talking about the full repayment. Of course without any description on the consequences, the tech debt may be equated to a bug, you really have a problem and you want to discuss only its solution. Another difference is that the importance of a bug rarely changes over time, once correctly triaged. With the technical debt instead - A won't fix doesn't mean that the interests are gone. You closed the bug/tech debt and you are not counting the interests anymore. Convenient and deceiving. There is no status currently that could put the bug on hold. Removing it from all the short term consideration, but make it still count for its interests, make it possible to consider and reevaluate at any time. - A tech debt really can get more and more costly to repay. If someone else implement something over you "imperfect" code, the cost of the repayment just doubled, because you have to fix a stack of code now. Marking the code with a # TD may warn someone "be aware that someone is trying to build over a problem" - The frequency of interests may increase also over time, and the importance may raise as we are paying too much interests, and may be better to start considering full repayment. - One of the solution to a technical debt is "conversion": you just render the imperfect solution just less imperfect, that is you don't fully repay it, you repay just a little to lower the interests cost or frequency. It's not a workaround, it's not a fix, you're just reducing its impact. How do you report that in a bug tracking system ? > I'm kind of split on the idea of templates for Reno. On the one hand I > could see it being useful for complex things, but on the other I wonder if > something complex enough to require a template actually belongs in release > notes or if it should go in formal documentation. The template part would be just an aid to the developers, but I certainly see the possibility for this solution to overgrow and start doing something for which reno was not created for. That's why I'm looking for feedback. __________________________________________________________________________ OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions) Unsubscribe: openstack-dev-requ...@lists.openstack.org?subject:unsubscribe http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev