So I just discovered that, on OSX:
– alt+space to open Spotlight accidentally
– escape to close it
– Your WP comment closes (in admin view at least) and it’s all erased…

I will respond another time, but the gist of it is, your solution there is minor and common and likely what you would have done even without client pressure (would you really want to upgrade an old app)? Everyone does this sort of thing, especially in JS.

Your scenario assumes that the customer accepted the responsibility and will not come back to the mechanic if there is fault.

This does not happen for developers, it’s always their fault, it always comes back, they always have to fix it. Under the later assumption (the one I just made), the mechanic should apply a solution he can live with, because he knows the customer will come back with the same issue or a new issue caused by his work.

Yeah, the tech debt primarily hurts developers. Yeah, it is unpleasant when client insists to “strap the pipe”, then comes back saying that the whole car caught on fire. But what about situations where client only had time/budget for the strap, and are happy because we found a quick solution that works for their needs?

Anyway, a real example. A defect comes in saying that a “submit payment” button of our older web apps does not work on a specific android version. We investigate and discover that the issue is in a third party JS library. The problem is fixed in it’s later release, however, a few dependent libraries will also have to be upgraded in our app, probably not without changes to our own code. This means more dev and testing effort. As the client wanted a solution NOW, as it’s impacting his business in a pretty straightforward way, a workaround was done to actually track down the relevant change in the 3rd party library (boiled down to few JS lines), patch the version we’re using, and deploy. It was ugly but it worked. Yeah it was not pretty, but to team’s decision, safest approach given the situation.