How ignoring technical debt nearly destroyed a bank’s reputation
And ruined a team
Everyone knows that technical debt is bad. Still many choose to ignore technical debt in favor of new features that are expected to bring value. Often the potential value of the new features is considered to be more important than the costs of technical debt. Here’s an account of a team that made this choice and came to regret it. The names are altered.
The big day is near
For team Tidal Wave, the big moment is approaching fast. Their new Payment Router system survived the litmus test with a limited amount of carefully selected clients. This Sprint they will make the product available for the complete international internal payment flow of the bank. We’re talking about millions of payments totaling billions and billions of dollars.
It will be huge.
One small thing
But there’s this small thing that happened, occupying Claire from the Development Team and Jesse, the Product Owner. Claire is worried:
“Puneet thinks he found the cause of the issue in production. It has to do with the shortcut we choose to apply instead of a rigorous time consuming alternative. It doesn’t work properly. Fixing it will take about half the capacity of our…
