Technical debt is code that needs to be written or refactored but we’re not doing it because we’re focused on something else. Maybe it’s development in new features for example. And so the technical debt will accumulate over time. If you don’t pay this technical debt by doing the refactoring, over time, what’s going to happen is when you build new things, you’re going to have to pay what’s called interest on that technical debt. The new features are going to take longer to build because you never dealt with cleaning up that code. Over time, the interest that you need to pay to develop a new feature or something will continue to go up and up and up. Eventually it can kill a project I have seen it happen. So you need to take care of your technical debt at some point. If you don’t, it will accumulate and eventually can lead to much higher costs of development and failure of the project.
