Technical Debt Derails Organizational Goals and Impedes Progress and Innovation
Summary
They chose to prioritize the launch date instead of the quality of the application.The team’s technical debt accrued in the form of the extra time and effort they used for refactoring because they didn’t build on an appropriate framework in the beginning. The low-quality code will require a rewrite in the future–resulting in a higher total cost in terms of money and time–but may also introduce risk and liability into the product. Software developer and Agile Manifesto co-author Martin Fowler added some nuance by classifying deliberate and inadvertent technical debt as either reckless or prudent. • Deliberate and reckless technical debt happens when the development team prioritizes speed over quality even though they don’t need to—and they could avoid the consequences if desired. Recent reports suggest that 69 percent of IT leaders identify technical debt as a major threat to the ability of their company to innovate.