This month, I want to highlight an article by Riot Games, A Taxonomy of Tech Debt. Tech debt is an overloaded term. This article defines four types of tech debt (Local, MacGyver, Foundational, Data), and describes how to determine the most impactful tech debt to tackle. I found this article extremely clear and relevant to general engineering practices.
https://engineering.riotgames.com/news/taxonomy-tech-debt
“When engineers talk about any existing piece of technology – for example League of Legends patch 8.4 – we often talk about tech debt. I define tech debt as code or data that future developers will pay a cost for. Countless blog posts, articles, and definitions have been written about this scourge of software development. This post will focus on types of tech debt I’ve seen during my time working at Riot, and a model for discussing it that we’re starting to use internally. If you only take away one lesson from this article, I hope you remember the ‘contagion‘ metric discussed below.”
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