With all the snow lately I know everyone was looking forward to another Summer Friendly T-Shirt Series post. To be honest I did not have time to finish writing the next article in that series yet as I was shoveling snow most nights this week – I will be back on track next week.

For those who have worked in software development for any length of time you will have heard the phrase technical debt. It is usually associated to why an estimate for requested work may be higher than you think it should be.

If you are not familiar with the concept this post On Technical Debt was a very good write up of what Technical Debt is and is not, and if you are familiar with the concept this post may make you think about it slightly differently.

Here is a tidbit as Dom barker states:

Technical debt is a commonly misunderstood term. It’s often put like this: Technical debt is accrued when a feature is implemented the quick way rather than the right way.

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Lets refine our definition: Technical debt is accrued when a feature is implemented in a manner in which maintainability is sacrificed in favour of other requirements.

It is important to remember that usually when decisions were made they were the best decision at the time based on requirements and constraints and we can expect things to evolve over time since both new requirements and constraints come into the picture.

What did you think of the article?

Let’s discuss in the comments below.