Model Tension Heuristics
summary
Argues that lingering design debt shows as concrete, named tensions — spork effect, model fragmentation, model sclerosis — and gives heuristics to find them in code, conversations and processes (look for duplicated invariants, scattered state, feature-flag compensations, synchronized releases). Shows a worked example: a search model polluted by booking concerns, how that created brittle coupling and distributed failures, and recommends extracting a booking aggregate via a transitional shared kernel and running small experiments to validate fixes.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00The myth of the big ball of mud
- 2:02Identifying accidental design debt
- 7:19Model entropy and sclerosis
- 12:17Model tensions as signals
- 17:01Fixing intrinsic coupling
- 28:57Addressing extrinsic coupling
- 34:21Socio-technical tensions
- 44:39Heuristics and mitigation
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