Technical debt

Technical debt is the future cost of maintaining or changing software after choosing a quicker or more limited implementation. Like financial debt, it can accumulate interest when later work becomes slower or riskier.

Refactoring: Restructuring existing software code without changing its external behavior. Refactoring reduces debt by improving internal design while preserving what the software does.
Software maintenance: Work performed after software release to correct faults, adapt it, or improve its quality. Maintenance is where the future costs of technical debt often become visible.
Ward Cunningham: An American computer programmer who helped create the Wiki and the programming language Smalltalk. Cunningham introduced the technical-debt metaphor to explain the cost of expedient design choices.
Code review: The systematic examination of source-code changes by developers other than their authors. Reviews can identify shortcuts and make their expected maintenance costs explicit.
Software productivity: The rate at which software work produces useful, working outcomes. High debt can reduce productivity as routine changes demand extra effort and coordination.
Code smell: A surface sign that software design may make change or maintenance harder. Code smells can signal design choices whose costs compound as the system evolves.
Software quality: The degree to which software satisfies requirements and properties such as reliability, usability, and maintainability. Debt concerns quality attributes that quick implementation choices may weaken.
OOPSLA: An annual conference focused on object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications. Cunningham presented the metaphor at OOPSLA in 1992.
Continuous integration: A development practice in which code changes are frequently integrated and automatically tested. Automated feedback can limit the defects and integration costs that accompany rushed changes.
Software reliability: The probability that software operates without failure for a specified period and conditions. Debt can undermine reliability when shortcuts weaken testing or make failures harder to prevent.

Linked from 15 pages