The Technical Debt Trap
summary
Technical debt is a deliberate design or learning tradeoff that requires clean code is prerequisite and tests so refactoring is possible; messy, untested work is cruft, not debt. Successful decisions include an explicit payback plan and business awareness; failure spirals into slower delivery and rewrites. Measure and monitor with coverage, cyclomatic complexity, coupling and a maintainability index, focus fixes where churn is highest, follow the Boy Scout rule, and prefer continuous small cleanups over episodic “debt sprints.”
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:21What is Technical Debt?
- 1:57Ward Cunningham
- 5:28Technical Debt is a Metaphor
- 8:36Clean Code is Required
- 9:50Dirty Code is a Bad Idea
- 10:10Is it Technical Debt?
- 11:54Chill. It's just semantics, man.
- 12:36The Technical Debt Quadrant
- 16:27Cruft or Debt?
- 20:21Cruft is a bad decision
- 24:46Avoid The Trap
- 26:45Monitoring Cruft/Debt
- 29:14Review
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