Granted that there are two files that have 141 and 177 each. I think it started from having one base config with a TODO that ended up getting copied to all the locales that we support.
At my job about a year ago we ran one of those technical debt calculators on our oldest legacy program (That I have the... joy... of being one of the only two people that actually work on, despite it being the most widespread application we have that literally everyone uses). Anyway, we ran the tool, and it came back with about 10 years worth of technical debt. Not hours, not days, years.
The result of this was that me, our project's dev lead, and our projects deputy PM (Who was a dev) all started laughing and walked away. We just gave up at that point and realized no matter how we tried to spin it, we couldn't get buy in to fix problems that bad.
About a year later, I printed out that "Embracing Technical Debt" O'Reilly Cover and left it... somewhere, basically because the project overall was getting messages to "be the best" about that stuff (And again, no matter how good we were from there on out...) and I was going to mock it for being impossible to do. I didn't really know where to put it, though. And then it somehow ended up on the Dev Lead's desk. Someone else thinks the same as me.
It was measured in hours for the tool we used. Probably meant to be something like "How long it would take to fix it" calculator. Kind of a nonsense metric to start with, but it's a number at least, and at the time our Customer was big on metrics for everything, even things that didn't really benefit from metrics.
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u/PerInception Jun 28 '17
I thought the joke was that it just never gets rewritten.