The Technical Debt Metaphor
I love metaphors. Metaphors help me better understand an abstract idea. Software development is filled with metaphors. One of the metaphors widely used in software development, albeit often misunderstood, is technical debt. Technical debt is a term coined by Ward Cunningham , you can hear what he has to say about it here . Technical debt is a metaphor that refers to a very particular problem. Making a decision when you have limited understanding of the problem domain, or making a decision that will speed up the development now, but might slow you down in future. Imagine I have a confusing module in my code. I wrote it early on in the development, when I had a limited understanding of the problem domain. It's been months and the module has been working fine without any sign of trouble. Now I have to add a new feature to it. I realize that while the internal quality of the module is good, it represents the limited understanding that I had. Adding ...