The Broken Window Theory or Why Technical Debt is an Evil

Have you ever heard about the broken windows theory?

It states that any visible signs of crime and civil disorder, such as broken windows, vandalism, loitering, public drinking, create an urban environment that promotes even more crime and disorder.

"One broken window, left unrepaired for any substantial length of time, instills in the inhabitants of the building a sense of abandonment—a sense that the powers that be don’t care about the building. So another window gets broken. People start littering. Graffiti appears. Serious structural damage begins. In a relatively short period, the building becomes damaged beyond the owner’s desire to fix it, and the sense of abandonment becomes reality." - Andrew Hunt & David Thomas in "Pragmatic Programmer"

Therefore, we may conclude that policing these relatively small misbehaviors will decrease or prevent an increase of the crime rate in the area.

I hope you've already noticed where I'm going.

If you leave "broken windows" (bad designs, wrong decisions, or poor code) in your codebase, very soon it'll become a "dangerous place to live in". So, don’t leave them unrepaired. Fix them as soon as they are discovered, otherwise, all of a sudden, you'll need to get a dumpster, or move to another neighborhood.

Easier said than done, yeah?

#dev #thoughts