--- title: "Broken window theory" url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/7/28/broken-window-theory.md" canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/7/28/broken-window-theory.html" published: "2003-07-28T20:57:00" updated: "2003-07-28T20:57:00" tags: ["Cool Articles"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "Everyone should know about the Broken window theory . \"Researchers studying urban decay wanted to find out why some neighborhoods escape the ravages of the inner city, and others right next door—with the same…" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Broken window theory By Roy Osherove July 28, 2003 In [Cool Articles](https://osherove.com/blog/category/cool-articles) **Historical article** · Originally published July 28, 2003; technical details may be outdated. Everyone should know about the [**Broken window theory**](http://www.artima.com/intv/fixitP.html). "Researchers studying urban decay wanted to find out why some neighborhoods escape the ravages of the inner city, and others right next door—with the same demographics and economic makeup—would become a hell hole where the cops were scared to go in. They wanted to figure out what made the difference. The researchers did a test. They took a nice car, like a Jaguar, and parked it in the South Bronx in New York. They retreated back to a duck blind, and watched to see what would happen. They left the car parked there for something like four days, and nothing happened. It wasn't touched. So they went up and broke a little window on the side, and went back to the blind. In something like four hours, the car was turned upside down, torched, and stripped—the whole works. They did more studies and developed a "Broken Window Theory." A window gets broken at an apartment building, but no one fixes it. It's left broken. Then something else gets broken. Maybe it's an accident, maybe not, but it isn't fixed either. Graffiti starts to appear. More and more damage accumulates. Very quickly you get an exponential ramp. The whole building decays. Tenants move out. Crime moves in. And you've lost the game. It's all over. We use the broken window theory as a metaphor for managing technical debt on a project" ## More in Cool Articles [All posts in Cool Articles](https://osherove.com/blog/category/cool-articles) - Aug 11, 2003 ### [Server.Transfer vs. Response.Redirect](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/8/11/servertransfer-vs-responseredirect.html) - Jul 28, 2003 ### [Resolving DataSet Conflicts](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/7/28/resolving-dataset-conflicts.html) - Jul 28, 2003 ### [Debugging in Visual Basic .NET](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/7/28/debugging-in-visual-basic-net.html) - Jul 27, 2003 ### [Asynchronous Execution in Visual Basic .NET](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/7/27/asynchronous-execution-in-visual-basic-net.html) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/