Comparison
Debt quadrantvsTechnical debt
Debt quadrant
someone finally separated the corners we cut on purpose from the ones we cut without noticing.
Fowler's classification of debt along two axes: deliberate or inadvertent, prudent or reckless. It is useful because the four kinds need different responses — prudent deliberate debt needs a repayment plan, inadvertent debt needs learning, and reckless deliberate debt needs a conversation about how the decision was made. It is the quickest way to stop a debt discussion becoming a single undifferentiated pile that never gets prioritised.
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.
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