Imagine you’re building a house. You want to finish it quickly, so you take some shortcuts along the way. You use low-quality materials, skip some important steps, and don’t do thorough testing. The house is functional, but it’s not built to last and has several issues.
Technical debt is like those shortcuts in software development. When developers rush to meet deadlines or take quick solutions, they accumulate technical debt. They might write code that is not well-structured or lacks proper documentation. They may skip optimizing performance or addressing underlying issues. These shortcuts make the software work for now, but over time, they create problems, like bugs, slower performance, and difficulty in adding new features.
Just as a house with shortcuts needs maintenance and repairs, software with technical debt requires extra effort and resources to fix and improve it in the future. So, technical debt is the consequence of taking shortcuts during development, which leads to additional work later on to fix and improve the software.
Acknowledgement: this post was written with the help of, but not by ChatGPT.
