The Technical Debt Community

So you’ve got Technical debt… now what? Ward Cunningham coined the metaphor back in 1992, and it has since been taken on by the industry to describe the consequences of poor software architecture and bad coding. This website encourages a pragmatic view of technical debt, attempting to elevate the discussion from merely defining technical debt to finding approaches for business technology organizations to use technical debt awareness as a vehicle to fix fundamental problems.

Recent blogs posts

Technical Debt Twitter Event #boxchat

By Alexandra Szynkarski | April 29, 2013

For those that use Twitter regularly, Box UK will be hosting a #boxchat Twitter discussion on Thursday, May 2 at 1pm EDT dedicated to our favorite topic… Technical Debt! They will be discussing the technical debt that can accumulate when software is not regularly reviewed and refactored. With contributions from both software developers and product owners, they will look ... read more

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Visualizing Technical Debt

By Tomas Malmsten | April 2, 2013

Technical Debt is something most teams struggle with in one way or other. One of the more common issues I encounter is how to visualize the actual cost of technical debt in a way that the business stakeholders understand. To achieve this I have used a special product backlog type with some additional data. The debt needs to be ... read more

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Can Technical Debt Be Quantified? The Limits And Promise Of The Metaphor

By Matt Holford | March 19, 2013

Anyone whose professional life has intersected with the technical debt metaphor knows its power: the simple proposition that such a thing exists opens up a new channel of communication among groups (IT and application developers, designers, biz dev) that famously have trouble communicating about technical decisions. Not everyone understands test cases, aging platforms, crufty code bases, or security loopholes, ... read more

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Prioritizing Your Technical Debt

By Alexandra Szynkarski | March 11, 2013

Steve Garnett from Ripple Rock (an IT consulting company that assists customers in improving their software development capabilities) is one of many who has experienced Technical Debt on a project he worked on in the past. His new blog post captures a common problem: you know the Technical Debt is there, you know that it’s going to ... read more

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Broken Windows

By Corey Cossentino | February 27, 2013

One of the tools we use when developing production web services is a script that runs nightly to compile a list of any errors in the webservers’ error logs, and email anything abnormal to the developer list. This often helps us to catch broken links, uninitialized value warnings, and code paths that we may have ... read more

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Convincing My Manager to Deal With Technical Debt

By Alexandra Szynkarski | February 25, 2013

A question was recently posted on StackExchange asking the following: “Should I try to persuade my manager that code tidying should take priority over meeting deadlines?” And if so, what is the best way to go about it? The answers that have been posted in response to this question have brought up a common dilemma: How ... read more

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