What is Technical Debt?
The accumulated cost of shortcuts, quick fixes, and deferred quality work in a codebase or system. Like financial debt, it compounds: a shortcut taken today becomes a constraint that slows down every future change. Coined by Ward Cunningham, the metaphor deliberately frames engineering quality as an economic decision, not a moral one.
My perspective
In practice
Some technical debt is strategic: shipping a prototype fast to validate demand is a reasonable trade. The problem is unmanaged debt: code nobody dares touch, tests nobody trusts, deployment processes that require heroics. The antidote is making debt visible (track it), paying it down incrementally (refactoring sprints), and never letting it accumulate faster than the team can service it.