Technical Debt

Managing Technical Debt with Explicit Payoff Triggers

Technical debt is not simply bad code. It is the future cost created when an engineering decision makes today’s change easier at the expense of later work. Some debt is accidental: a rushed abstraction becomes difficult to extend, or duplicated logic grows in several places. Other debt is deliberate. A team may accept a narrow implementation to meet a deadline because building the general solution immediately would cost more than the expected benefit.