Paying Technical Debt: a Top-Down Approach

Ward Cunningham introduced this metaphor, explaining that “shipping code first time code is like going into debt”, and immediately emphasizing that not repaying it very soon “counts as interest on that debt”. The metaphor used here is very powerful, because we can immediately visualise the added interest to the initial debt. The same author remarks, more than 20 years later, that: “The irony of our industry is that code turns out to be ‘harder’ than hardware when it is thought to be finished and the developers dismissed.”