Southwest Airlines and the gremlins of technical debt.

It is Halloween season, so I enjoy a few monster movies during downtime.  I am partial to the old Universal monster movies with Bela Legosi and Boris Karloff.  I also enjoy anything with Vincent Price, and I consider his film “The Abominable Dr. Phibes” one of the most frightening things I have ever seen.  There is something about monsters lurking in the shadows that always scares me.  One of my favorite monster movies comes from director Joe Dante and is entitled “Gremlins,” which is a fantastic popcorn movie and a parody of entertainment culture at the same time.  Today, on the blog, I want to discuss a different kind of gremlin lurking in the shadows and how it has been fouling up air travel.   

The British invented the term gremlin.  In the early days of aviation, airplanes were not mechanically reliable; engines would jam, flight controls would snap, and canvas would tear without explanation.  Mechanics and pilots often blamed these mishaps on “gremlins,” nasty elf-like creatures who liked to cause mischief on an aircraft in flight.  By the Second World War, pilots from the United States and Royal Air Force had stories about gremlins.  If anyone has stories about these creatures from the German, Russian, or Japanese Air Forces, please share them in the comments.  Suffice it to say that gremlins were an excellent alibi for poor maintenance, bad design, or dumb luck.  The gremlin became a part of aviation culture. 

I keep thinking about these critters the more I work in technology. I wish I could invoke them during a debrief of a poorly executed project or explain a server outage. Unfortunately, gremlins are mythical creatures, and if I use them to present a technical problem, my client's CIO would laugh at me and then ask me to pack my desk and leave the building.  

Gremlins are comforting compared to the problems technical professionals face with increasingly complex systems.  Earlier this month, Southwest Airlines could have invoked the little monsters during a three-day weekend when it faced a severe shortage of flights.  Some pundits on the internet spread the false rumor that the slowdown was a strike created by pilots who refused to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.  The reality is less about the civil disobedience of pilots than the negligence of Southwest Airlines and its Information Technology systems.

According to the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association spokesperson, “I point to how they (Southwest) manage the network and how I.T. supports that network.”  The union has been complaining about the reliability of I.T. systems for over four years.  Company officials have not commented on the claims, but based on the events of the long holiday weekend, it is easy to see how an outage can ground an entire fleet of planes.  

I understand why something like this could happen at a large organization.  The internal system that schedules flights is buggy or unreliable.  Debate within the organization happens, and a decision is made not to fix the system because the cost and inconvenience are greater than dealing with the flawed system.  The conscious choice to do this is called technical debt in the Agile community.  It sits in the organization like a time bomb waiting to explode the business at the least convenient time.  I suspect that is what happened to Southwest Airlines. This situation underscores the potential risks of technical debt, which can lead to severe disruptions and even ground an entire fleet of planes. 

Having technical debt in your organization is like having a box of gremlins and tossing them into a swimming pool.  Bad things are going to happen.  This is why everyone in an organization needs to regularly look at technical debt and evaluate it seriously. Otherwise, your organization will get grounded.  To avoid a horror movie corral the gremlins of technical debt, you will be glad you did. Regular and proactive technical debt evaluation is crucial to prevent potential disasters and keep your organization afloat.  

Until next time.