I have been on both sides of this and it sucks. I came up with Rug Driven Development as a title. All the risks and future problems are swept under the rug quickly while maintaining a happy smile and pretending everything is just fine and dandy.
I have been on both sides of this and it sucks. I came up with Rug Driven Development as a title. All the risks and future problems are swept under the rug quickly while maintaining a happy smile and pretending everything is just fine and dandy.
I so need to steal this term. Not exactly for what you are describing even if I come across this on a nearly weekly basis in so many different industries. Be it automotive, be it finance, be it what ever.
But - and this is were I will probably use it in the future - I come across it in agency work. You win a shiny new project proposal and need to quickly show something for your corporate "partners" to shine before their management. To make them look good for their yearly appraisals or what not.
You already know that you will never fix the underlying shit you built, because your contract will be a new pitch three years down the line and it isn't clear if you will win it again. So let the next people deal with the tech debt - but guess what: They will just do the same. So debt will pile on and on.
So "Rug Driven Development" will be my goto term going forward.
They let this go on for about six years before I arrived and saw it. It took me pointing out that there is a decent chance this is caused by the process relying upon something in the OS kernel that isn't quite aligned to the kernel documentation but is good enough, and the immediate respawn behavior might rely upon that in turn. If the kernel ever is "fixed", then this audit-compliance-related process suddenly stops and doesn't respawn, or worse, won't start at all, becoming top of mind with all the senior management. It is always cheaper to fix problems in the small before they become problems no one can ignore.
The urge to sweep problems under the rug and move on is very powerful within our industry. Until you've done the same yourself and been bitten so many times, your scar tissue twitches every time you see the same pattern again. These days, I treat code problems like I treat cleaning up messes while cooking: I clean up as I go along. My scar tissue thanks me now. There is a delicate balance between addressing these problems in the small and bikeshedding, though.
BTW, I performed an strace that revealed a SIGKILL just pops in without anyone or any known process issuing it. The application developers suspect something in the OS, so we're now engaged with the application support team, OS support team, and our own internal OS support team to trace it down and beat it into submission.
I call such things "Ancient Wonders". As in artifacts from long ago that the company owns, but nobody knows how they work or how they were built, and nobody can build one today. There may, in fact, be only one left. Whoever did build them was privy to some Tribal Knowledge that has since been lost.
I worked at a shop whose Ancient Wonder was their custom templating engine with an embedded Python interpreter. The only guy who knew how to compile it had left years before I joined, and as a result everybody just copied the same Solaris .so to new development/test/prod servers as they came in.
Read this story, "Institutional Memory and Reverse Smuggling" [0] - once upon a time, a petrochemical factory was built. Decades later, the plant is still operating and being maintained. But at this point, nobody knows how the whole factory worked, why it was built that way, which processes it ran or how it was constructed...
[0] https://lemming-articlestash.blogspot.com/2011/12/institutio...
I'll steal this :) Encountered a few of those during my career as well as if you can't see a problems they can't hurt you...