Smoke dectectors explain technical debt.

Since the holidays, I have made a point of spending time with people outside the technology field. This experience has been beneficial because I spend my time explaining what a scrum master does and how we do it. This review of the basics allows me to reflect on my work and how to improve it. It is a fresh perspective that has allowed me to look at old concepts in a different light. This week, I want to revisit technical debt.

I own my own home.  Since I am a homeowner, I have smoke detectors.  These little battery-powered devices warn me when there is a fire or when I am burning a roast on the stove.  So smoke detectors offer protection to homeowners so they can escape the house quickly and call the fire department.  Smoke detectors are so helpful you receive a discount on your home insurance if you have one, and in some municipalities, you must have at least one in your home.

Smoke detectors have one significant drawback: they are battery-operated.  You are helpless when the batteries run out, and a fire breaks out.  The smoke detector companies fix this by forcing the alarms to “chirp,” a friendly reminder to change the batteries.  I awoke to my smoke detector “chirping” at 2 AM this week.  Like many men my age, I attempted to roll over in bed and ignore the situation.  Ninety minutes of insomnia later, I wandered the house searching for batteries to replace the faulty one in the “chirping” detector.

The next morning, over an extra cup of coffee, it occurred to me that I treated my smoke detector like many organizations treat technical debt. I do not change batteries until I have to, and usually, it is at an inconvenient time. Fortunately, being a former Boy Scout, I was prepared with batteries in an easy-to-find location. I swapped out the batteries and went back to bed. 

As a homeowner, you have four strategies to deal with smoke detectors.

1. Typically, change all the batteries at once during daylight savings time.
2. Change individual batteries when they run out of charge and begin chirping.
3. Ignore chirping smoke detectors until you get fed up and change the battery.
4. Remove and disconnect all the smoke detectors and hope you never have to deal with a fire.

As a homeowner, I use strategies two and three.  I know others who use the other two approaches.  Swap out smoke detectors and batteries, and you have the four classic strategies companies use to address technical debt.

The most efficient way to deal with technical debt is to follow the first strategy by changing batteries and updating systems regularly. This reduces expected outages and scrum encourage this approach.

Many CIOs and managers consider this madness because there is insufficient time, money, and people to keep updating systems.  It means they rely on strategies two and three.  It may be suitable for a chirping smoke detector on a cold night, but it is lunacy for a multi-billion dollar enterprise.  It creates situations where firms could lose millions of dollars while they wait to bring systems back.   

So the next time someone looks at you funny when you talk about technical debt, just explain it to them, it is like changing the batteries in a smoke detector.

Until next time.