Garbage Collect Your Technical Debt

There is a kind of design distortion that happens when a team chooses to build iteratively instead of looking at all of the requirements at once. Ward Cunningham coined the term technical debt to describe those design distortions.1 By understanding the causes of tech debt and connecting them back to a team’s actions (or inactions), it’s possible to minimize the buildup of tech debt and keep a system healthy indefinitely. The way to minimize tech debt is to view a software development process as an algorithm, consider several algorithms, and choose the right one for the circumstances.