Questioning Technical Debt

Technical debt is a metaphor that lets developers explain the need for refactorings and communicate technical trade-offs to business people.[9] When we take on technical debt we choose to release our software faster but at the expense of future costs, as technical debt affects our ability to evolve a software system. Just like its financial counterpart, technical debt incurs interest payments.

Technical-debt decisions apply both at the micro level, where we may choose to hack in a new feature with the use of complex conditional logic, and at the macro level when we make architectural trade-offs to get the system through yet another release. In this sense technical debt is a strategic business decision rather than ...

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