Last updated on July 24th, 2018 at 08:19 pm
Many believe that technical debt arises, in part, because of a phenomenon known as the Tragedy of the Commons [Hardin 1968], which is an allegory that purports to demonstrate that the user communities associated with shared resources inevitably degrade those resources until they’re depleted. The allegory supposedly supports the thesis that only monocratic control of an asset can provide the strict regulation that prevents its inevitable degradation as a result of shared use. Advocates of this approach to limiting the degradation arising from the expansion of technical debt hold that assigning sole ownership of resources, resource by resource, is the only effective method of controlling technical debt.
The resources in question here are the assets that tend to accumulate, or are accumulating, or have accumulated, technical debt. Adherents of the theory would impose order by dividing each technological asset into one or more sectors, sometimes called development silos, with only one organizational unit designated as the “owner,” empowered to develop, maintain, or extend that sector [Bossavit 2013] [Morris 2012]. Irreconcilable disagreements about the direction or purpose of a particular sector of the asset presumably would be resolved by branching.
Ironically, such an approach would — and demonstrably does — produce significant technical debt in the form of duplication of artifacts and services. Moreover, it elevates costs relative to a truly shared asset, by reducing sharing, and increasing the need for testing. We can regard such an approach as dysfunctional conflict avoidance [Brenner 2016b].
Although at one time the Tragedy of the Commons was regarded as a universally valid concept in political economics, subsequent research has demonstrated that the principle it describes is not generally applicable. Hardin first described the Tragedy of the Commons in 1968, in the form of an allegory [Hardin 1968]. In his words:
Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.
As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?”
Hardin then explains that each herdsman is compelled by the logic of the situation to exploit the shared resource to the maximum. Each herdsman puts his own interests ahead of the welfare of the resource.
And so it goes, supposedly, with technical debt. Each user of the shared asset expends resources on development, maintenance, and enhancement only to the extent that the expenditure is justified by immediate need. Retiring any legacy technical debt, or any technical debt accumulated in the course of meeting those immediate needs, is regarded as low priority. Because resources for debt retirement are rarely if ever sufficient to meet the need, technical debt grows inexorably. Eventually, the shared asset becomes unmaintainable and must be abandoned.
However, careful research shows that Hardin’s Commons allegory is not applicable to every situation involving shared resources. That same research casts doubt on the validity of the assertion that development silos are necessary in any approach to technical debt management.
Certainly there are many examples of shared resources degrading along the lines outlined by Hardin, such as the collapse of the Northwest Atlantic cod fishery [Frank 2005], but many counterexamples exist. Research by the late political economist Elinor Ostrom uncovered numerous examples of complex social schemes for maintaining common resources efficiently and sustainably [Ostrom 2009] [Ostrom 1990]. Ostrom studied and reported on systems that successfully managed shared resources over long terms — in some cases, centuries. For this work, she received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009.
As Ostrom’s research demonstrated, the problem with Hardin’s allegory is that it applies only to shared resources that are open to use by all without regulation. The misapplication of the Tragedy of the Commons is clearly described in a World Bank Discussion Paper by Bromley and Cernea [Bromley 1989]:
For some time now, Hardin’s allegory of the “tragedy” has had remarkable currency among researchers and development practitioners. Not only has it become the dominant paradigm within which social scientists assess natural resource issues, but it appears explicitly and implicitly in the formulation of many programs and projects and in other beliefs and prejudices derived from it. Unfortunately, its power as a metaphor is not matched by its capacity for aiding our understanding of resource management regimes. By confusing an open access regime (a free-for-all) with a common property regime (in which group size and behavioral rules are specified) the metaphor denies the very possibility for resource users to act together and institute checks and balances, rules and sanctions, for their own interaction within a given environment.
The real tragedy for technology managers would be their failure to learn from the past errors of social scientists and political economists, and to then repeat, in the context of technical debt management, this now well-understood confusion about the domain of applicability of Hardin’s allegory.
We can apply Ostrom’s result to the problem of managing technical debt if we identify the technical asset as the shared resource, and identify as the community exploiting the resource the stakeholders who employ, develop, maintain, cyber-defend, or extend that technical asset. Ostrom’s results tell us that sustainable exploitation is possible only if the community devises rules, customs, and sanctions that manage the technical debt. Kim and Wood [Kim 2011] provide an analysis that explains how regulation can avert depletion scenarios. Technology managers can apply these lessons to the problem of managing technical debt.
The Tragedy of the Commons is a distraction because technical debt isn’t an inevitable result of sharing assets when the organization adheres to a Principle of Sustainability. That principle is that sustainability is possible only if the community sharing the asset devises customs, rules, and sanctions that effectively control the level of technical debt. You just can’t have a free-for-all unregulated regime, as most organizations now do. Management and practitioners must collaborate to devise the customs, rules, and sanctions for managing the asset. And regular updating is probably necessary. Leadership in devising those customs, rules, and sanctions is a job for the policymaker.
[Bossavit 2013] Laurent Bossavit (@Morendil), “Zero Code Ownership will lead to a tragedy-of-the-commons situation, where everybody bemoans how ‘technical debt’ makes their job suck.”, a tweet published April 20, 2013.
Available: here; Retrieved December 29, 2016.
[Brenner 2016b] Richard Brenner. “Some Causes of Scope Creep,” Point Lookout 2:36, September 4, 2002.
Available here; Retrieved December 30, 2016.
Available here; Retrieved December 29, 2016.
Available here; Retrieved: March 10, 2017.
Available: here; Retrieved December 29, 2016.
Available: here; Retrieved: July 30, 2017
Available: here; Retrieved: July 30, 2017
Available here; Retrieved December 30, 2016. This blog entry contains an assertion that controlling formation of new technical debt requires only “diligence, ownership and governance.”
Video, 8:26 min. Apr 3, 2009. here; Retrieved December 29, 2016.
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- Failure to communicate long-term business strategy
- Failure to communicate the technical debt concept
- Technological communication risk
- Team composition volatility
- The Dunning-Kruger effect can lead to technical debt
- Self-sustaining technical knowledge deficits during contract negotiations
- How performance management systems can contribute to technical debt
- Zero tolerance and work-to-rule deliveries create an adversarial culture
- Stovepiping can lead to technical debt
- Unrealistic definition of done
- Separating responsibility for maintenance and acquisition
- The fundamental attribution error
- Feature bias: unbalanced concern for capability vs. sustainability
- Unrealistic optimism: the planning fallacy and the n-person prisoner’s dilemma
- Confirmation bias and technical debt
- How outsourcing leads to increasing technical debt
- How budget depletion leads to technical debt
- Contract restrictions can lead to technical debt
- Organizational psychopathy: career advancement by surfing the debt tsunami
- The Broken Windows theory of technical debt is broken
- Malfeasance can be a source of technical debt