Ward Cunningham, the creator of the concept of technical debt, explained by himself.

This translation post is published under CC BY 3.0 based on the original article.

"Technical Debt" has been a hot topic in the world of system development, and is often on fire.

The creator of the concept of technical debt is Ward Cunningham. In 1992, he compared the first release of the code to debt in the Experience Report of the object-oriented international conference OOPSLA '92 ("Shipping first time code is like going into debt").

Ward Cunningham has made many contributions to the software world. He was the inventor of the Wiki, a mentor of XP and TDD's father Kent Beck, who imported the "pattern language" of the architectural world into the software with Kent Beck, also the one of the member of "Manifesto for Agile Software Development" (for more information, see "パターン、Wiki、XP ~時を超えた創造の原則" or blog articles "君はWard Cunninghamを知っているか? 前篇後篇").

So, what was behind the idea that Ward invented the concept of technical debt? What did he think and why did he come up with this concept? In fact, Ward posted a little less than a five-minute video on YouTube in 2009 explaining the background of technical debt.

www.youtube.com

And the transcript of this video is posted on wiki.c2.com (that Ward himself first world developed Wiki), I have translated it as follows.

[Translation] Debt metaphor.

(The wiki translation follows in the original article.)

After the translation

What's surprising is that what Ward Cunningham is saying is quite different from the "technical debt" we envision.

The image we have in the term "technical debt" might be "crudely written code that prioritizes the release, and is left over without a clean rewrite" or "technical foundation (language, infrastructure or framework) that has become old". Or, Wikipedia in Japanese article states that "The Consequences of Haphazard Software Architecture and Unprepared Software Development". But these come from misunderstanding, Ward says.

According to Ward, the negative impact of debt is the productivity loss caused by the disconnect between the understanding gained with development and the system you are facing, not the maintainability (or clutter) of the code you're writing. Rather, he says, you should always do the best you can at the time when you're writing code.

For Ward, the debt repayment method is refactoring, and the purpose of refactoring is to eliminate the gap between their domain knowledge and the current program. In other words, this refactoring can be said to be something like “Refactoring toward deeper insight” in domain-driven design (DDD). The theme for domain-driven design is "to tackle the core complexity of software", as you know. Of course, the scope of resolving deviations is not only limited to refactoring, but also includes rearchitecting, I think.

The word "debt" tends to be more positive (as in capital) for those closer to management, and more negative (as in loans) for those closer to technology. The debt metaphor Ward is talking about is rather positive. The development approach of releasing software quickly and repeatedly, and learning from experience and hypothesis testing, is becoming more and more common today. In addition, Ward's use of the debt metaphor came about because he and the person he was describing happened to be developing the same financial software. But then, the strong word "debt" may have walked alone and created the current impression of technical debt.

By the way, the WyCash refactoring that led Ward to create the debt metaphor was a strong inspiration to Kent Beck and would appear in his later work, Test-Driven Development (Ward is the protagonist of the Introduction of the book, and the theme of Part 1, "Multilateral Currencies," is based on WyCash's domain objects).

And, Ward consistently says only "Debt" without "Technical". Now, I'm also curious who and why added "Technical", but I would like to quickly bring the translation to the world first.