3 ms·

TL;DR Technical debt is the cost of reducing the total project cost by X

• brudgers 8y ago
  To me, the key technical debt analogies are leverage, interest, and bankruptcy/refinance. Borrowing against the future by doing the easy thing right now is likely to make future changes harder. But "predictions are hard, especially about the future." Sometimes the world changes in ways that entirely eliminates the debt...an organization ceases operations or it merges or it grows into a landscape that could not have been foreseen. Or in the world of startups, the organization grows into problems of scale, problems that the costs of solving upfront would have prevented growth. Google didn't waste time building Kubernetes in 2000. [edit] Ideally, the goal is not to pay down technical debt but to sell the asset backing the debt for profit or discharging the obligation to pay.