The Broken Windows Theory of Technical Debt "Product people - Product managers, product designers, UX designers, UX researchers, Business analysts, developers, makers & entrepreneurs 18 March 2015 True Prioritisation, Product Culture, Product Focus, Technical Debt, Mind the Product Mind the Product Ltd 835 Broken Windows Theory Product Management 3.34
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The Broken Windows Theory of Technical Debt

Broken Windows Theory No matter how you prioritise your backlog, it’s always a challenge to deal with technical debt.

Martin Fowler has a pretty good explanation of what technical debt is, and the obvious risks it brings:

Doing things the quick and dirty way sets us up with a technical debt, which is similar to a financial debt. Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice.

However, even some of the best prioritisation techniques out there (like the one Martin suggests in this blog post), tend to treat technical debt as an afterthought. This is a dangerous habit to get into. When you convince yourself that you’ve taken account of the extra time and effort required in your planning, it’s easy to justify carrying that debt for a long time.

But there’s another side-effect of carrying even small amounts of technical debt that’s harder to spot, and so harder to avoid. It’s an emergent problem that arises from the combination of lots of little bits of technical debt, and the best way I can describe it is by comparing it to the Broken Windows Theory.

What’s wrong with broken windows?

‘Broken Windows’ is a theory about crime developed by sociologists in the 1980s. It states that when low level crimes like vandalism (e.g. breaking windows of buildings) are ignored, soon larger and more serious crimes start to happen. Broken windows set a new norm of behaviour for the community, which is slightly closer to the criminal or anti-social, and people adjust their behaviour accordingly. It’s a vicious cycle that gradually causes a neighbourhood to become more and more run down and dangerous.

Products can have broken windows too. When short-term solutions or quick and dirty fixes build up in your code, these act like vandalism and neglect in a neighbourhood. We see the same kind of knock-on effects: if the code’s already ugly and hard to work with, adding one more quick and dirty fix feels like less of a big deal. And so without ever consciously making a decision to do so, the developers working on that product lower their standards for the quality of their own contributions. Why bother doing excellent work if it’s the only good code in the product, or if you suspect it’ll soon be overwritten by a nasty workaround?

This doesn’t only affect developers; it’s almost certainly affecting you too. You’re becoming more willing to build up technical debt, and less likely to prioritise paying it off. You started off tolerating broken windows, and now you’ve got epidemic car theft and are on the path to gang warfare.

Fixing broken windows

I found myself in exactly this situation early in my product career. My team and I were working on a huge new feature for an existing product, struggling to meet the deadline, and cutting corners as we went. We never felt like we were building up huge technical debt because each cut corner felt so small on its own. But, by the time we’d delivered the feature, the product resembled the kind of neighbourhood we’d be scared to walk through even in broad daylight.

The solution to a product in this situation is the same as for a neighbourhood. You fix the windows that are already broken and you make it a high priority to rapidly fix any new breakages that occur. It takes time to undo the damage though, so don’t try to fix everything at once. Identify the biggest, ugliest, most painful and embarrassing problem in the codebase and make it the top priority to tackle this first. To do this, you’ll have to communicate with your team about the situation you’ve found yourselves in. Admitting to each other that you’ve not been doing your best work – and committing to changing that – is just as important as the big symbolic fix.

Preventing broken windows

Once you’ve cleaned up your neighbourhood you need to ensure it will never get into the same state again. Here’s where we come back to prioritisation. Today, when I weigh up the priorities of new or improved features versus paying off technical debt, I stop and think about the broken windows in the neighbourhood. I ask other people on the team about the broken windows they see, that perhaps I’ve missed. By making sure we’re not letting quick and dirty fixes build up in the first place, we not only keep giving our product our best work but we avoid the emergent side-effects I’ve described here.

While it may take us a little longer to deliver those exciting new features, we know we’re building a better product and the whole team is proud of our work when we get there.

Comments 7

We use two approaches: (1) avoid q&d solutions, and (2) every Nth project for each developer, they must choose a window to fix. It helps the developers see the need for approach #1.

Great Post Kat, I was just talking to someone about this very same concept of letting in and getting ride of technical debt in your products – minus the broken window 🙂

Great article Kat. I think you can actually expand upon this idea to not just include Product and the development organization, but customers as well. Increasingly tech-savy customers notice of technical debt and I’ve found that it creates suspicion around the quality of the product. If they find these issues on their own, how many more issues are in the product that they haven’t seen yet… Not fun conversations to have. I recommend an approach of always reserving capacity each release for paying off some technical debt and then getting on a balanced budget.

Broken windows theory is one of the phenomenon associated with the behavioural dynamics of reciprocity, others include the lone rider problem and tragedy of the commons.
Bringing negative reciprocity under control is a tricky problem involving both the application of extrinsic motivators and the fostering of positive intrinsic ones.

However the term Technical Debt is not intended to refer to poorly written code. It’s author Ward Cunningham and the eXtreme Programming community were identifying a phase in the cycle of developing an application where new requirements mean that the domain model as expressed in code has to change to accommodate this new understanding. The debt is that difference or gab between what we understood at the time and our new concept model. There are some exemplars in Eric Evans’ tome on the subject: Domain-driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software.

Great article Kat, and I agree with the analogy to the broken windows theory as the more you let tech debt slide the worse it gets.

I didn’t address technical debt directly in my prioritisation post, so while you will always have to make room in your prioritisation for bug fixes, maintenance etc I absolutely agree that you also have to prioritise wholesale technical debt payments – often through revamping a feature and taking that opportunity to refactor the code, make better design decisions with everything you’ve learned since the quick and dirty version went live and build it right.

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