Technical Debt

What is technical debt?

Ward Cunningham, co-author of the Agile Manifesto and creator of the eponymous law, coined this term in 1992:

“Shipping first-time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite… The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt. Entire engineering organizations can be brought to a stand-still under the debt load of an unconsolidated implementation.”