Managing tech debt

Ward Cunningham, who introduced the term tech debts, used a bank analogy to explain tech debts, which appeared in the OOPSLA 92 Experience Report–The WyCash Portfolio Management System. He observed that creating debt is like not repaying a loan. One or two missed payments is fine, but longer than that will lead to an irrecoverable situation.

There are genuine tech debts and manufactured tech debts. Genuine tech debts are to support the business to meet sudden customer needs. On the other hand, manufactured debts are due to architecture erosion, lack of knowledge of people, lack of motivation, lack of discipline, the urgency of now, the pressure of delivery, lack of intent to do the right thing, lack of focus on architecture and design, and so on.

Robert C. Martin observed in his article A Mess is not a Technical Debt that in acceptable tech debt situations, decisions are taken in an informed way by properly analyzing trade-offs with a true intention...