Architecture & practice·Delivery, flow and technical debt
you shipped the quick version to make the date, wrote down what you skipped, and paid for it every sprint after.
Technical debt
Also calledtech debt, design debt
A deliberate trade of future ease for present speed, taken knowingly. The metaphor is load-bearing: debt has a principal and interest, taking it can be correct, and the danger is unserviced interest rather than the borrowing itself. Used precisely it is one of the few ways to make a technical argument financially legible to people who do not read code; used as a synonym for 'code I dislike' it stops working entirely.