[clug] [OT] 'Technical Debt' in Infrastructure, now entering mainstream media

[steve jenkin]

A more practical example of Technical Debt:

	Y2K

It’s not like the century roll-over caught anyone by surprise, not anyone who understood date & time. Calendars are “well understood”.

On this list, I’m guessing there’s two groups:

	- Those who were there in the trenches 20 years ago, probably working very hard on Y2K for a year or more, and
	- those who became Computing Professionals since Y2K.

While during Y2K there was a bunch of money spent on exhaustive testing and duplicating production systems “so nothing enters production without being rigorously tested” [not just code reviews & regression testing] - I’ve seen no evidence any of that continued or that management funded the continuation of those activities.

Any examples to the contrary most welcome.

To both groups:

	- What were the “Lessons Learned” from Y2K
		 and that organisations _will not_ repeat, or allow, to be repeated again?

		- note, I mean  formal, written “lessons", not ‘cultural’ or ‘local custom’.
		- with real consequences, as in “get disciplined, retrained, demoted or fired”.

	- How many more mass “fix this bug” events does anybody think there’ll be, even platform specific?
		Y2K was special because it was assumed to be affect _all_ software, all platforms.
		(“Planes will fly upside down or crash”, “electricity plants will fail”, etc: SCADA systems worked well)

Is there anyone in the 2nd group, practitioners who began working after 2000, have any observations on “Y2K” and “Technical Debt”?

steve j

> On 7 Nov 2019, at 12:37, steve jenkin via linux <linux at lists.samba.org> wrote:
> 
> I’d never heard ’technical debt’ used outside computing systems.
> 
> At last there’snow  a relatively mainstream media piece on the topic and its implications.
> 
> Software gets mentioned, though I’ve never seen a methodology to measure or estimate “software technical debt” [and refs out there?]
> 
> It seems the USA is discovering that Infrastructure Businesses are not, and cannot be sustainably managed as, simple Profit & Loss enterprises.
> Maintenance is everything [minimises expenses, maximises throughput & billables] and Continuing Upgrade ahead of Demand is necessary for “sustainability”.
> 
> Won't discuss Telstra or the MTM-NBN here.
> 
> ======
> 
> tweet thread, with pic of quote
> <https://twitter.com/alexismadrigal/status/1189313208500281344?s=20>
> 
> The Toxic Bubble of Technical Debt Threatening America
> 	Climate change will soon expose a crippling problem embedded in the nation’s infrastructure. 
> 	In fire-ravaged California, it already has.
> 	<https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/10/california-fires-and-pge-toxic-debt/600979/>
> --

--
Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design 
0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
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