In the lifecycle of every larger application there are many occasions where features evolve. In most cases the new version of a feature is compatible with earlier versions, but there are always cases where incompatible changes are required.
As example let me take the scenario the guys at KD WebConsult provided in their latest blog entry (which has inspired me to write this post, I have to admit). There is a component which introduces changes in the underlying repository structure, and the question is how to cope with that change in case of deployments.
I think that is a classical case of incompatible changes, which always result in additional effort; and that’s the reason why noone likes incompatible changes and tries to avoid them as much as possible. While in a pure AEM environment you should have the full control of all changes, it’s getting harder if you have system you depend on or systems depending on you. Then you run into the topic of interface lifecycle management. Making changes then gets hard and sometimes nearly impossible. You end up with supporting multiple versions of an interface at the same time. Duplicating code is then a way to cope with it. (The technical debt is not only on your side then, but also on the side of others no updating or able to update their use of the interfaces.)
So to come back to the KD Webconsult example I think that the cleanest solution is to build your component in a way, that it supports both the old and new the repository structure (their option 2). And if you are sure, that you don’t use the old structure anymore, you can safely remove the logic for it.
The thinking, that you can always avoid such situations and keep you code clean, is wrong. As soon as you are dealing with non-trivial setup (and AEM in an enterprise setup per se is a distributed application which comes along with other enterprisy requirements like high-availability) you have to make compromises. And taking technical debts for the time of a release or two is not necessarily a bad one if you can stick with standard processes (not changing deployment processes).
Things on a content management system 