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Comment by kilian | Hacker News Reader

The answer to this is educating your clients. This is an important part of running a company. You need to be able to tell your client in their language why something is hard to do. it's best to do this via metaphors or analogies concerning their profession.

You wouldn't believe how good a relationship with a client will be if they understand ehat you do ;)

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Agreed. Technical Debt is a great metaphor for explaining these concepts to non-developers.

http://forums.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/archive/2007/11/01...

Short-term technical debt can speed development, but like credit card debt, it quickly accrues interest. If you let your technical debt accumulate, then eventually you're spending all of your energy servicing the debt instead of improving your software.

It would be neat if there were some way to make this "debt" more visible to non-developers. At the moment it could be easily forgotten (by non-developers) after the initial deadline is hit, leaving no time to pay it back before the next "crisis" emerges.

The hardest part would be having some way to quantify the debt. But you could, at least, make a record of the corners cut, and make any accumulation extremely visible to management. Does anyone know of anything like this?

(estimated time - implentation) time over the course of the project + an interest rate. Older hacks tend to cause more hacks, so interest rate would be necessary (and more scary, which is a good thing )

We could have a pretty accurate debt precision in time, that time could be used to fix things ?

Unfortunately, most of the time, we are not the decision maker, especially if the requestor is of high rank (either from internal or external user with ranked M - SM,GM,MD etc). Even though I explain this and that, in the end, they will just say "Can do? When will you deploy it?"

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