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Technical Debt as a Product-Engineering Issue
What is it, how does it affect the business, and how product and engineering can work together to handle it?
What is technical debt?
A search of the current literature reveals many definitions of “technical debt.” Here are a few examples:
Technical debt is a concept in programming that reflects the extra development work that arises when code that is easy to implement in the short run is used instead of applying the best overall solution. — From techopedia.com
Technical debt … is a concept in software development that reflects the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy (limited) solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer. — From wikipedia.com
Technical debt … is the result of prioritizing speedy delivery over perfect code. — From productplan.com
Frankly, it doesn’t add up. If we need to change something in the implementation of the code today because we made a “wrong” decision in the past, it doesn’t matter why we made that decision. Now we simply need to fix it before it does more damage.
Maybe it was a good, optimal decision at the time. Maybe a future-proof solution would have…
