Talk:Technical debt

Value judgment phrase

The phrase "the architecture of a large software system is designed and developed too hastily" makes a (possibly unwarranted) value judgement about software management practices. Although I am in favor of clean code and good documentation (etc), I also recognize that there may be situations where they can and should be set aside (temporarily) for the purpose of releasing code. This is not inconsistent with the notion of debt; sometimes taking on debt is appropriate...

Technical debt is not the same as design debt. Technical debt is the general concept and can apply to low-level coding issues. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.210.143.114 (talk) 08:31, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

I think the article should mentioned the keyword 'refactoring'. In some good words, mention that 'refactoring' is a usual outcome of technical debt (in software development). —Preceding unsigned comment added by Evoluzion (talk • contribs) 23:24, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

Wow, this is an awesome concept, I'm going to start using it more often in the analysis and budgets of the systems i work with :) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.169.201.55 (talk) 11:54, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Technical debt is code, systems setup, etc what evolution wants to kill, but the debt refuses to die because of people want to keep it living that way. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.193.120.17 (talk) 16:04, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Paying off technical debt

Very interesting and increasingly important topic. Could be helpful to clarify what is meant by:

"'Interest payments' are both in the necessary local maintenance and the absence of maintenance by other users of the project.

Sgb1960 (talk) 12:17, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

Not all Technical Debt is the result of poor design

I think the article is very misleading in too narrowly scoping technical debt to things that are the result of poor design. Not all technical debt is "work that needs to be done before a particular job can be considered complete or proper". The article itself eludes to this: '"Interest payments" are both in the necessary local maintenance and the absence of maintenance by other users of the project.' So technical debt can apply to any system that requires maintenance of any kind.

All systems have technical debt, even those that are perfectly designed. There will always be maintenance involved, either at the hardware or software level, and if you fail to acknowledge that, then you fail to realize how different architectures minimize long term technical debt.

Technical debt generally also includes the cost of maintaining and supporting an instance of a system. The software could be complete and properly designed, but regardless, you still have technical debt. If the system is designed such that a new instance of the application is needed for each client, then your technical debt is multiplied by the number of customer instances you have to standup.

Often SaaS approach tries to minimize that kind of technical debt by using a centralized multi-tenant system so that long term maintenance/support does not grow significantly in relation to the number of users/customers. This is also the reason(not always justifiable) that many business are moving to the cloud, to decrease the technical debt of maintaining hardware and operating system locally, so that they only need to maintain the instance of the application they are running on the cloud system.

199.44.231.8 (talk) 21:01, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

You make some good points; you're welcome to edit them in if you can find some WP:RS. Reify-tech (talk) 00:00, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

External links modified

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Suggested links to remove citation Maintenance Tag

This link could be used to support several of the tech-debt reasons: http://www.ontechnicaldebt.com/uncategorized/the-causes-of-technical-debt-do-not-exist-in-a-vacuum/ Then the tag can be removed. Mediation4u ^(chat) _{nb: editing is fun} 10:54, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

"Technical Debt" Not Defined.

This is odd: the article does not define "technical debt."

We are told that it is a concept which reflects A, can be compared to B, and is used in C. A good deal else is said about it.

Nowhere is it said what it is or is claimed to be.

David Lloyd-Jones (talk) 12:05, 20 April 2019 (UTC)

As of March 2019, which I think based on the date on your comment is the version to which are referring, the first sentence is "technical debt ... reflects the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer". The use of reflects is odd, but otherwise this is what I'd call a definition. Stevebroshar (talk) 11:58, 17 September 2025 (UTC)

the definition of tech debt isn't correct

> 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

tech debt isn't always choosing the easier (limited) solution. it could be incurred for many reasons such as legacy or outdated system, poor design practices, lousy code structure, etc. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ucalgary26 (talk • contribs) 06:31, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Poor design practices and lousy code structure are IMO mostly consistent with choosing an easy (limited) solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer. The other thing (legacy or outdated system) seems to imply that debt can accrue due to the environment changing. I get that. Stevebroshar (talk) 12:02, 17 September 2025 (UTC)

The Contribution of Cultural Practices in Software Engineering on Technical Debt and Relevance in Saudi Arabia

Abstract The concept of technical debt (TD) in software engineering has garnered much interest among academics due to its impact on software development. This research aims to investigate the cultural traditions of software engineering in Saudi Arabia and their influence on technical debt (TD).... Eng. Anna (talk) 14:13, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

What is your point? Stevebroshar (talk) 12:03, 17 September 2025 (UTC)

Definition misses crucial aspect

WRT "Technical debt refers to the implied cost of additional work in the future resulting from choosing an expedient solution over a more robust one. While technical debt can accelerate development in the short term, it may increase future costs and complexity if left unresolved."

I might read this to mean that tech debt is something one intentionally takes on to reduce development time and cost. But that is incorrect. It does refer to a cost to maintain code that's attributable to (lack of) quality, but usually it's a retroactive assessment; not a proactive or intentional choice. This aspect makes it very different from financial debt where one must make a very intentional choice to take on debt. This aspect is important to understanding the concept and needs to be stated. Stevebroshar (talk) 12:49, 17 September 2025 (UTC)

I edited the intro to describe the generally unintentional nature of tech debt. Stevebroshar (talk) 14:50, 17 September 2025 (UTC)