What Is Technical Debt?

In this chapter we begin by learning what technical debt really is. We’ll learn that it is not a technical problem, but rather it is the consequence of trade-off decisions we make, where we take on technical debt in exchange for a benefit, like an additional feature or earlier delivery. We’ll also learn that technical debt is influenced by factors like the organizational structure we are within or whether the project is on schedule or late. We also construct a new model to describe the technical debt problem, the onion model.