Technical debt and productivity
Technical debt is made up of all those things in our system (architecture, code, documentation, etc) that are working but are of sufficiently poor quality that they cause us to move slower when implementing new functionality. Perhaps we need to do additional testing before we can add something new or we need to refactor the code to make it cleaner or more extensible. Perhaps it’s just hard to read or understand and therefore difficult to know how to add the new functionality.
Technical vs Architectural Debt
I was first introduced to the idea of splitting technical debt into two distinct parts during a conference talk given by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock. She talked about there being a real difference between simple cleanup such as renaming or adding clarity and architectural restructuring.