Just a Five Minute Job - A Home Improvement Metaphor for Tech Debt

One of the most interesting panel discussions that I participated in during Agile + DevOps 2018 centered around Technical Debt and what we can do about it. We found ourselves using a metaphor of home improvement projects a few times - especially the idea that you don't always know how big the task is when you start. With that in mind, I'd like to present a short recap of a recent "five minute" easy home improvement fix I found myself in.

The Problem:My girls share a room which contains one of the air returns for the heater. The grate covering this duct was no longer staying in the wall. This had led to at least one feline excursion into the ductwork, and now required that a trashcan or other large object block the grate to keep the cats away.

The Estimate:
This isn't a difficult fix. All I needed to do was grab my drill, zip in a couple of drywall anchors, drive the screws back into the wall, and done. Five minutes. Max.

The Reality:
First off, the grate cover is the wrong size for the hole. What I really should have done was get a new cover, or enlarge the hole, but one of those things would require spending extra money, and the other would require measuring and cutting additional bits of drywall. Both were out of scope.

After grate removal. Can't expand the hole to the left because there's a wall stud there.

My first fix was exactly as specified in the estimate. That worked fine, right up until I realized that the screws were now too short to properly open the drywall anchors. Okay, I'll get some new screws.

Then the screw on the right drove the drywall anchor straight through the sheet of drywall and into the five inch gap in the wall that I didn't realize was there.

Feline help from Romana the Time Kitty did not decrease the task duration.

No problem, I can go grab a couple of 2x4 ends, trim them up, fill the gap between the walls, and drive a 3" wood screw in there.

Which I did. Total time, between trimming 2x4 scraps, swapping out screws, removing busted drywall anchors, and oh yes, removing a helpful cat: forty-five minutes. That's 9x longer than my original estimate.

Yeah, this drywall anchor isn't going to work. I don't know why the original grate was set up with that screw so close to the edge of the hole.

To bring this full circle, it's the same issue with technical debt. You don't know what you don't know. Even so, technical debt must be handled. If I'd known I needed to trim up some lumber to fill a gap, etc, my original estimate would have been a lot more realistic. As it is, sometimes you just have to pull a task off the board, set aside 10x whatever your time estimate is, and hope this task is actually what it seems. Ever time, the set of unknown unknowns in your infrastructure will (hopefully) decrease. Every time I dig into a fix in this house I learn a bit more about it, and shrink my list of unknowns a little more. Eventually I'll know this place as well as the builder. I hope.

We Can't Be High-Functioning Alcoholics Forever - Agile+DevOps East Day 6 AAR

The final day of Agile + DevOps East 2018 dawned to something a little different. The Agile Leadership Summit was expressly designed to have a different feel than the main conference, with a pair of presentations in the morning followed up by brainstorming some ideas and solutions to issues that those of us in the Thursday night networking session had identified.

I had my doubts about my participation in this day. I’m not in a position at my company where I’m anything but an individual contributor, and for the most part that’s exactly what I’m comfortable with. No more, no less. What was I doing at a leadership summit anyway?

Anne Hungate’s presentation called Lead Yourself First erased my doubts straight away. This may have been one of the most important talks of the whole conference for me personally. One critical point: my company sent two people to this conference. That’s well less than 1% of our total workforce. We may be primarily IC’s in our jobs, but other members of our teams are now looking to us to show that we learned something over this week. The lessons that we’ve acquired shouldn’t just apply to us, we should be evangelizing them throughout our teams and finding ways to make everyone better because we attended this conference.

For the afternoon, I joined a group looking for solutions to Technical Debt. In talking to my fellow test engineers over the course of the week, one of the things that really stood out was practically all of us were struggling with technical debt and finding time to build the automation that our companies needed. By far the dominant solution among my fellow TEs was that we ignore it, get pulled into manual testing and dev tasks, and buy rounds of drinks while commiserating with our peers. Since most of us don’t actually want to spend the rest of our careers as high-functioning alcoholics, any ideas for fixing this problem are a good thing.

"Oh, you think you've got tech debt? Let me tell you a story..."
"You win bro. I've got this round. Dilly dilly."
Image via Holly's Cheat Day

We ended up with a very interesting, diverse group of individuals from the UK, Netherlands, and the US, representing the defense, banking, consulting, and insurance industries. Andrea Goulet joined our table to contribute her thoughts as well.

Did we solve the technical debt problem? Of course not. This isn’t something that going to be solved for all companies in a single afternoon at a technical conference. We did, however, come up with a few creative ideas that may help us push some solutions forward within our respective companies. One of the biggest points that we made over and over was that technical debt needs to be treated like a real-world maintenance problem: for example, you can ignore changing the oil in your car, but eventually that small, ignored bit of maintenance is going to lead to a big, expensive breakdown.

I ended the day with a visit to Disney Springs for a bit of shopping. Can’t go home to The Terror Team empty handed. After three years of cold, snowy winters, hearing Christmas music and seeing Christmas decorations while walking around a gigantic open-air mall wearing shorts and a t-shirt was fairly jarring. Eating a meal outside was nice, but I won’t feel like Christmas is actually a month and or so away until I’m back home glaring at the snow on my lawn.