Technical Debt¶

Technical debt is the accumulated cost of shortcuts taken during development that trade short-term speed for long-term maintainability, widening the gap between how a system is built and how it would need to be built to support change easily and safely. Like financial debt, it is not inherently bad: a deliberate decision to cut a corner in order to ship can be a sound investment, as long as the team tracks the obligation and pays it down before the interest compounds. Problems arise when debt is incurred unconsciously or left unmanaged, until teams spend most of their capacity working around the past rather than building toward the future.

See also: Software Architecture · Architecture for Flow