Comparison
Broken windowvsTechnical debt
Broken window
the first ignored warning became forty, because after the first one nobody felt the file was worth keeping tidy.
The observation from The Pragmatic Programmer that visible neglect invites more of it: one unfixed hack, ignored warning or disabled test lowers the standard for everything that follows. It is a claim about people rather than code, which is why it is not fixed by tooling alone — but a build that fails on new warnings is the cheapest available enforcement. It is the mechanism by which technical debt compounds socially rather than technically.
Full entry →Technical debt
you shipped the quick version to make the date, wrote down what you skipped, and paid for it every sprint after.
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.
Full entry →