Chapter 2. Technical Debt
Technical Debt includes those internal things that you choose not to do now, but which will impede future development if left undone. This includes deferred refactoring.
Technical Debt doesn’t include deferred functionality, except possibly in edge cases where delivered functionality is “good enough” for the customer, but doesn’t satisfy some standard (e.g., a UI element that isn’t fully compliant with some UI standard).
— Ward Cunningham1
Origins of Terminology
Technical debt emerged on the C2.com (also known as Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc.) wiki within a discussion on the “First Law of Programming.” The ideas expressed ...
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