Technical debt is a term to describe the side effects of accumulated design decisions over the lifetime of project development and maintenance.
Technical debt can be accrued in a number of ways. In his book ‘Essential Scum’, Kenneth Rubin defines three distinct sources of technical debt:
naive technical debt– caused by team member, business, or process immaturities
unavoidable technical debt– we can’t perfectly predict how our product and its design will need to evolve over time
strategic technical debt– strategic shortcuts taken during product development and maintenance to achieve short-term goals at long-term expense
Why does this matter? The build up of this technical debt has long-term consequences to the product. Those include:
Increased time to delivery
Product atrophy
Underperformance
Decreased customer satisfaction
It’s not hard to see how the concept of technical debt can also be applied to a business’ adherence to set process. There are trade-offs both short and long term involved there as well.
Until next time!
Leave a Reply