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What is Technical Debt?

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Technical debt (also known as tech debt or code debt) describes what results when development teams take actions to expedite the delivery of a piece of functionality or a project which later needs to be refactored. In other words, it’s the result of prioritizing speedy delivery over perfect code.

If you’ve been in the software industry for any time, chances are you’ve heard the term “technical debt”. Also known as design debt or code debt, the phrase (or more accurately, the metaphor) is widely used in the technology space. It is referred to as a catchall that covers everything from bugs to legacy code, to missing documentation. But what exactly is technical debt anyway? And why do we call it that?

We describe technical debt as:“With borrowed money, you can do something sooner than you might otherwise, but then until you pay back that money you’ll be paying interest. I thought borrowing money was a good idea, I thought that rushing software out the door to get some experience with it was a good idea, but that of course, you would eventually go back and as you learned things about that software you would repay that loan by refactoring the program to reflect your experience as you acquired it.”

Good practice within a scrum team is to not add more than 20% of the workload in a sprint about technical debt. Because a customer is waiting for an increment of value, they do not care if you are refactoring your code. They want a shippable working piece of software. That is why we cannot work on technical debt of more than 20%. That means if you have a sprint that you are going to deliver 100 user story points, that means only 20 user story points are allocated for technical dept user stories.
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