technical debt
English
Alternative forms
- tech debt (clipping)
Etymology
Coined by American computer programmer who developed the first wiki Ward Cunningham in 1992.
Noun
technical debt (countable and uncountable, plural technical debts)
- (software engineering) The implied cost of additional future work caused by choosing an easy but inferior solution originally.
- Synonyms: design debt, code debt
- 2012, Kenneth S. Rubin, Essential Scrum, Addison-Wesley, →ISBN, page 142:
- An important attribute of technical debt is that it grows in an unpredictable, nonlinear fashion. Each bit of technical debt, when added to the pool of existing technical debt, might do significantly more harm than the size of that new debt might imply.