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Not all Tech Debt is created equal

Diogo Machado
Geek Culture
Published in
5 min readJul 28, 2021

El país de la revolución. Havana, Cuba - December 2017.

Debt is a good analogy to explain what happens with code if no care is taken:

Debt grows if not payed.
It can lead to chronic abuse.
Cumulative debt grows exponentially.
Eventually leads to bankruptcy.

However It can be useful if tactically used. Can be a leverage if well managed. Debt has the implicit urgency of payment. It’s a useful concept to communicate with stakeholders. There is some emotional triggering when someone finds he is in debt. However, there are different types of debt. Not all debt is created equal.

The first category we can assign to code debt is by his nature: Code debt can be deliberate or accidental.

Deliberate code debt is typically a design decision. A tradeoff to gain some advantage now at the expense of the future. It can be used to leverage some milestone. Deliberate code debt when used as a tactical tool is an expression of a high time preference.

The tradeoff between now and later is called Time Discounting.

Delivering something that works now with debt can be much more valuable than the same thing one month later. Deliberate code debt can be planned and controlled if well…

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Diogo Machado
Diogo Machado

Written by Diogo Machado

Software architect/developer. Developing software on the shoulders of giants.

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