Tech Debt

Every place I have worked has talked about tech debt, and nobody I know has worked anywhere that didn’t. The usual definition of tech debt is “the rework required by past choices”, and I think that leaves out most of the story. This is a series on what tech debt is, why we call it debt, why everyone has it, and why we should take the metaphor seriously, even literally.

1. To whom is technical debt owed?: Iterating on this ubiquitous metaphor.
2. Tech debt is more than past bad choices: In which Software Engineer Stu doesn’t save the day.
3. Software decays in different ways: But everything falls apart.
4. Technical Debt as Actual Debt: Taking metaphors literally.