Tech Debt Tetris

Some time ago I was getting an old gameboy up and running again and found myself enjoying a game of Tetris. It occurred to me that this game is not dissimilar to the concept of technical debt.

When you make a mistake in Tetris you end up with a hole in a row that is buried beneath subsequent rows. You can’t clear that row until you clear all the rows above it which accumulate as you make mistakes and introduce more holes. With each cumulative row your time to think about the next piece is reduced until you eventually run out of space and lose the game.

Technical debt could be visualised as the hole in a Tetris row. Each time we accumulate technical debt we leave a hole in our system which gets buried by subsequent rows. With each subsequent row that debt becomes more difficult to deal with until we have accumulated so much debt that we can no longer keep up with the rate of change and the game is lost.

Technical debt is inevitable but paying it back is an ongoing and necessary part of engineering. Be careful not to accumulate so much that you are in danger of losing the game.

Do you know how much debt you’re carrying?