What Is Technical Debt?

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Ward Cunningham introduced the concept of technical debt in 1992. He defined it as follows:

“Shipping first-time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite…. The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt. Entire engineering organizations can be brought to a stand-still under the debt load of an unconsolidated implementation, object-oriented or otherwise.”


Cunningham used the ‘Technical Debt’ metaphor to emphasize the benefits and limitations of speedy development. The metaphor was well received by both business and technical people as it resonates with financial debt. Like financial debt, technical debt accumulates interest with late repayment.
In 2004, Joshua Kerievsky describes ‘design debt’ in his article ‘Refactoring to Patterns” and the associated costs. Then again in 2014, Grady Booch compared evolving cities to evolving software and described how lack of refactoring can lead to technical debt. He stated:

“The concept of technical debt is central to understanding the forces that weigh upon systems, for it often explains where, how, and why a system is stressed. In cities, repairs on infrastructure are often delayed and incremental changes are made rather than bold ones. So, it is again in software-intensive systems. Users suffer the consequences of capricious complexity, delayed improvements, and insufficient incremental change; the developers who evolve such systems suffer the slings and arrows of never being able to write quality code because they are always trying to catch up.”


Get the answers to the below questions in my management book, The Basics of SCRUM: A Simple Handbook to the Most Popular Agile Scrum Framework, available exclusively at Amazon.

  • What is a Technical Debt?
  • What are the main causes of Technical Debt?
  • What are the consequences of Technical Debt?
  • How do you manage Technical Debt?
  • What are some of the practical examples of Technical Debt?
  • What are some of the practical techniques to manage Technical Debt?
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