The cost of debt
Any financial adviser will tell you that debt has costs. The cost of interest is the biggest and most obvious one. Technical projects have debt as well. "Quick and Dirty gets it done", "Deadline Rules" and "We'll fix that in the next release" are but three of the refrains common to almost any technical project. At times, they have their place. It would be foolish to postpone a major "go-live" to change the structure of an index and the lost revenue could collapse the viability of the program. However, too many times, "putting off til tomorrow", becomes "let the new guy/gal/team worry about it" because of staffing turnover or because the development team and the maintenance teams are in different departments. This maintenance is the technical equivalent of interest in the financial realm. This blog post is a great read and should be mandatory for all IT managers involved in development or maintenance projects. Jeff e...