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Technical Debt: How to Identify, Plan and Deliver Debt Changes

All projects have some element of technical debt, but it doesn’t have to be a nightmare to manage

Jamie Burns
Better Programming
11 min readMay 4, 2022
Photo by Kostiantyn Li on Unsplash

Anyone working in mainstream software engineering in the last few years will have doubtless come across the term ‘Technical Debt’. It seems the definition of this is pretty hard to track down, and as a result, everyone seems to have a slightly different idea as to what this means.

In some cases, this results in the technical debt being completely ignored (not a great idea), and in others, it is used as an excuse to force unpopular changes through to production (also not a great idea). But it doesn’t have to be this way— technical debt can be an extremely useful tool in the development of your solutions.

The term ‘Technical Debt’ goes all the way back to the early-1990’s and has been developed and reinforced alongside the growing popularity of Agile.

The basic idea is that when building a solution, code is produced which is less than ideal. In the interests of getting a solution ready for production, this is accepted as ‘good enough’, whilst admitting that this decision might make future development more costly (in terms of time or effort). So by making a decision to speed up development in the…

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Jamie Burns
Jamie Burns

Written by Jamie Burns

Software Engineer, founder of Bungalow64 Technologies