You don’t have to have many conversations with a team before the term “technical debt” comes up. The concept of technical debt has become so diluted that it’s not useful by itself, you have to dig in to find out what it means. (A bit like if you hear “Agile”)

It could describe:

  • An old system created by previous developers that nobody wants to put the time into understanding.
  • Code that depends on older versions of languages or libraries that aren’t supported and don’t receive security updates.
  • A technical process that’s running out of capacity as more users use the software and needs a rewrite to support projected workloads.
  • Some new cool tech the developers want to play with but can’t justify by itself

Think of the last time you heard the words “technical debt”. What did the person saying it really mean? If it was you was there a more specific way you could have described it?