High Optionality Programming: Software Architectures that Reduce Technical Debt - Part 1 | Petabridge
A concept I’ve been trying to put a name to is software application architectures that inherently lend themselves to a lower rate of technical debt accumulation than others. This post is my first attempt to do that.
Technical debt is a term that is used frequently in our industry and while its meaning is commonly understood among experienced technologists, it’s not clearly defined.
Here’s what makes technical debt so complicated to pin down - its real cost depends upon what might happen later in the future, due to changing circumstances, environments, business requirements, and so on. These can be really difficult to anticipate at the onset of a greenfield software project even for well-intentioned, experienced, and disciplined programming teams.
One the most painful experiences of my software development career was at my last startup, MarkedUp, where we had to migrate off of RavenDb and onto Apache Cassandra under dire circumstances in early 2013.
