Money to Burn? Invest in Functional Debt

But is there a flip side to this?  I think there is and the term I would use is Functional Debt.  This is tied firmly in the YAGNI camp and relates to functionality that is developed without a need (or worse still a test).  Applying too much design, or developing generic frameworks with no business reason to do so inevitably leads to a solution which is over-engineered.  Of course, over-engineering as a term has been around for a long time, but I prefer the term Functional Debt, because this ties it back to money in a similar way to Technical Debt.

Debt is a term that evokes emotion and is easy for people to identify with and it is this capacity of the term to clarify the issue with a certain practise.  Over-engineering as a term doesn't evoke the same response and certainly doesn't suggest a loss of money in the same way that Debt does.

There are of course direct, easily measurable costs involved in creating unused functionality and that is the development costs, however, there are many more subtle costs that are easy to overlook.  There is the missed opportunity costs associated with not doing the right thing.  There is the project overhead costs in maintaining code that is not used.  There is the project overhead costs in increased complexity and time for the standard day to day activities of testing and refactoring.  There is the increased maintenance costs since it is now harder to understand the code for support personnel...

One of the biggest causes for Functional Debt I have seen is a lack of customer (business) involvement or direction.  Left to their own devices, IS departments naturally build overly- complex solutions to simple problems.  Without a business value attached to a piece of functionality (actually to a problem that is solved by a piece of functionality) it is only too easy for the IS department to burn money like there's no tomorrow.

          

Here's my list of basic requirements.

I want to be able to

• view all messages in a single application, regardless of source (rss, google reader, twitter, etc).
• post messages to any of the applications I use (twitter, blog, facebook, etc)
  • Should also be able to post to multiple applications at once
• search and filter the content
  • filtered messages, should still be available for future search/display
• use multiple platforms (phone, web, laptop, desktop) with them all kept in sync
• specify multiple ways of notifying me if anything relevant appears
  • particularly important for mobile platforms
• switch between different modes (professional, private, meeting)

But MOST IMPORTANTLY

I DO NOT WANT TO:

• create YABA (yet another b****y account) to use yet another free online tool
• wait for hours while it downloads everything before I can view a single message

If anyone knows of such a tool, I'll be extremely happy to hear about it...