The Eternal Struggle: Backward Compatibility VS Technical Debt [EN]

WordPress draws a lot of its success from the fact that it jumps through hoops to maintain backward compatibility. Most WordPress sites can be smoothly updated to the latest version of WordPress Core with the click of a button. However, this compatibility comes at a steep price: through this absolute priority on backward compatibility, the project sets itself up to continuously accumulate technical debt in the process. The effects of this are an increasing effort to maintain the codebase and an increasing difficulty to add new features. Let’s examine how these two factors interrelate and what this means for WordPress’ current state and future evolution.

Spreker

Over Alain Schlesser

Alain is a freelance software engineer and WordPress consultant living in Germany. He is the maintainer of WP-CLI, the command-line interface for WordPress and works on WordPress Core itself as a contributor and component maintainer. He offers higher-level consulting, code reviews and software design coaching, enabling companies to deal with frequent change and ever-growing complexity while optimizing for reduced maintenance effort and lower total cost of ownership. Passionate about software architecture and code quality, he never misses an opportunity to share best practices and tries to live up to his educational aspirations through public speaking and blogging. You can read his thoughts on code & other things at https://www.alainschlesser.com or say hello on Twitter under the handle @schlessera.