Technical Debt
whatis.com, February 1st, 2023
Technical debt -- or tech debt -- is the implied cost incurred when businesses do not fix problems that will affect them in the future. Accruing technical debt causes existing problems to get worse over time. The longer debt builds up, the more costly it becomes to rectify.
Companies that delay or omit work for the sake of speed accrue technical debt, which they need to pay back later or face consequences. Technical debt is a common concept in software development, where team leaders delay features and functionality, cut corners, or settle for suboptimal performance to push the project forward. It occurs as the result of a "build now, fix later" mentality. In software engineering, tech debt is sometimes called code debt.
DevOps, Scrum and Agile development frameworks rely on speed, so managing technical debt in these methodologies is important to ensure quality isn't sacrificed.