Technical Debt

A WTF Moment!

Technical Debt: a neologistic metaphor referring to the eventual consequences of poor or evolving software architecture and software development within a codebase.

An example? (Actually I'm not sure if this qualifies or is more of a "misguided genius" thing):

I need to make up two mutually exclusive lists for markets to support an existing provider and a new provider of the same Ancillary product.


In our database there is a table : dbo.tbAncillaryNavigationOptions which contains columns: MarketID and LanguageID. A row gets added to this table to define valid combinations for that Ancillary.

awesome -- sounds easy then just look at our markets and build two lists. What could be more straightforward.....

lets look at dbo.tbMarkets then.....

SELECT * FROM dbo.tbMarkets

1 World
2 Andorra
3 United Arab Emirates
4 Afghanistan
....
.... OK this seems OK.
.... Wait, there's more!
.....
237 Zambia
238 Zimbabwe
239 all except DE
240 all except FR
 ....
.... errr? ok I guess
.... more?
.....
813 auto
814 all except NL
815 all except DE,AT
818 Countries not covered by SkyTours
819 auto
820 EbookersMarkets
821 inc();exc(AT,)
.....
..... OH NO. WTF....... WTF!!!!!
.....
1269 inc();exc()
1270 inc();exc()
1271 inc();exc()
.....
.... ARGH.. MY EYES. THE GLASSES DO NOTHING
.... OH GOD MAKE IT STOP
....
1592 inc();exc()
1593 inc();exc()
1594 inc();exc()
1595 inc();exc()

So -- how to explain that this thing that should have been simple may, in fact, be impossible.