How To Make Technical Debt (TD) Your Friend
InfoQ, Tuesday, September 10th, 2024
Incurring Technical Debt (TD) is a way to learn things, and to avoid over-investing in solutions to problems you may not yet fully understand.
The idea that releases have to be perfect gets in the way of running experiments. TD reduces the cost of learning and the time it takes to get feedback.
TD represents a deviation of your implemented solution from your ideal solution, but that ideal may not turn out to be correct. In other words, what you think is TD may not actually be TD.
Using a Minimum Viable Architecture (MVA) approach helps teams decide when and if they need to address specific TD items by considering whether failing to address them will impair the success of the MVP/MVA.
TD is, ultimately, a good thing because it reduces the likelihood that a team will over-invest in architecture.