Member-only story
Technical Debt in Coding
Make good choices
Technical debt is the implied additional cost by adding new features rather than spending time to update software to represent your understanding of existing features.
Technical debt as a metaphor
Metaphors allow us to use analogies in our language and make concepts easy to understand.
The debt metaphor originated in financial software, but is applicable to any software development project.
The metaphor?
By continually stumbling over the same issues, it is like paying interest on a loan.
By rushing software, you eventually have to go back and effectively repay the loan to reflect your experience as you acquire it. This comes back into the software through refactoring and stumbling over issues.
If you always add new features rather than updating the program to reflect your understanding of those features mean that the program builds up issues and it takes more and more time to implement new features.
Technical debt as poorly written software
Software should represent your understanding when you wrote it. If it does not represent your understanding at any point in time, you should put the effort into…
