September 2014
Intermediate to advanced
416 pages
13h 39m
English
As a system evolves, its complexity increases unless work is done to maintain or reduce.
—Prof. Manny Lehman
Nobody likes debt but, as harsh as it might sound, some level of debt in life is unavoidable. Technical debt in software is no exception. Abstractly speaking, technical debt is sort of a mortgage taken out on your code. You take out a mortgage every time you do quick-and-dirty things in your code. Like mortgages in life, technical debt might allow you to achieve an immediate result (for example, meeting a deadline), but that comes at the cost of interest that needs to be paid back (for example, higher costs of further maintenance and refactoring).
In Chapter 2, “Designing for success,” we identified ...
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