Getting into technical debt in a recession?

I like this succinct quote from TalkTalk CIO David Cooper about the IT systems in newly acquired Tiscali.

"In addition, Tiscali faced some IT issues in the past and worked pragmatically to fix them, resulting in some discontinuities between systems – we are repairing this now," www.computing.co.uk/computing/analysis/2252848/ringing-changes-talktalk-4893004

There are, no doubt, times to go for the cheapest, quickest most 'pragmatic' solution to getting systems to mesh together. But in getting to a solution for least cost there can be an accumulation of 'Technical Debt'. I know that one of my clients in my day job, keeps a measure of technical debt being accumulated in development projects. But it is difficult to persuade an organisation to contemplate such debt, let alone put it on the balance sheet.

It's never easy either to argue for spending money on technical debt when you can have new shiny functionality baubles. What we find we do at Village Software when working on clients projects is try to improve things as we go along. Most clients would not be happy if we suggested they spent 10’s of thousands refactoring a system with little or no functional gain. Hence I suspect we often do this on the cheap out of a possibly misplaced or at least poorly negotiated sense of professionalism. We have recently spent a five figure sum refactoring our Lab Solution to improve it under the hood, I've got to say this hurts and we are now on a functionality campaign.

I wonder what the effect of the current recession is on technical debt. In principle resources to deal with it are cheaper than in a boom time. However the need to gain the cost reducing, innovation gaining benefits of Business Information Systems at lower investments will surely lead to an increase in technical debt across the economy. Perhaps the UK is accumulating billions of technical debt in the public and private sector to match the vast national debt in the public sector and the balance sheet retrenchments in the private sector.

The term 'Technical Debt' by the way was coined by Ward Cunningham as a useful allegory. One of the great thinkers in current software development Martin Fowler describes it on his Wiki martinfowler.com/bliki/TechnicalDebt.html. He explains that getting things done, in a way TalkTalk's David Cooper describes generously as pragmatically, is like borrowing money, you have to start paying interest, eventually you have to pay it back along with the principal. Ward Cunningham has a neat little 4 point plan referring to technical debt in software development. (For those not familiar with the term, refactoring is the practice of improving software code quality without adding functionality). Cunningham describes technical debt on his Wiki (all these guys have wikis) www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?ComplexityAsDebt :-

• Skipping design is like borrowing money.

• Refactoring is like repaying principal.

• Slower development due to complexity is like paying interest.

• When the whole project caves in under the mess, is that like when the big guys come round and slam your hands in the car door for not paying up?

Others describe it by the allegory of lactic acid building up on your muscles during a run. In the wider world of Commercial and Government ICT we can expect a build up of such debt. For businesses without a strategic plan for ICT, the resources to deliver a plan or whose plan is to accumulate technical debt there is going to be a backlog. Alas 'Technical Debt' will not be appearing on balance sheets soon if indeed there were a way to measure it. I would be baffled if a student asked how to go about measuring technical debt in his company.

I have a feeling that the Information Systems people, like me, will somehow get the blame for letting such debt accumulate.

Life can be unfair, but it is indoor work no heavy lifting.

An interesting article about search engines...again...

Victor Keegan (Guardian Technology journalist) published an interesting column yesterday on the current state of search engines. The column entitled, "Why I am searching beyond Google", is an interesting discussion which picks up on something that has been discussed a lot on this blog: the fact that Google really isn't that good any more. There are dozens of search engines out there which offer the user greater functionality and/or search data which Google ignores or can't be bothered indexing. Yahoo! and Bing are mentioned by Keegan, but leapfish, monitter and duckduckgo are also discussed.

Keegan also comments on the destructive monopoly that Google has within search:

"If you were to do a blind tasting of Google with Yahoo, Bing or others, you would be pushed to tell them apart. Google's power is no longer as a good search engine but as a brand and an increasingly pervasive one. Google hasn't been my default search for ages but I am irresistibly drawn to it because it is embedded on virtually every page I go to and, as a big user of other Google services (documents, videos, Reader, maps), I don't navigate to Google search, it navigates to me."

This is where Google's dominance is starting to become a problem. Competition is no longer fair. There are now several major search engines which are, in many ways, better than Google; yet, this is not reflected in their market share, partly because the search market is now so skewed in Google's favour. As Keegan notes, Google comes to him, not the other way round.

In a concurrent development, WolframAlpha is to be incorporated into Bing to augment Bing's results in areas such as nutrition, health and mathematics. Will we see Google incorporate structured data from Google Squared into their universal search soon?

I realise that this is yet another blog posting about either, a) Google, or, b) search engines. I promise this is the last, for at least, erm, 2 months. In my defence, I am simply highlighting an interesting article rather than making a bona fide blog posting!