From the course: Agile Software Development: Remote Teams

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Understanding technical debt

Understanding technical debt

From the course: Agile Software Development: Remote Teams

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Understanding technical debt

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- [Instructor] A few weeks ago, I made some cupcakes for a friend's baby shower. Unfortunately, I got caught up in the frenzy of creation, that when the cupcakes were finished, I looked at my kitchen and found a huge mess. I had only thought about making the cupcakes, and when it came time to rush out the door for the event, I admit, I left that mess in my sink to deal with it later. Too often, this is the way we treat our code. In our frenzied push for features, it's easy to overlook the digital mess that we leave behind. Software projects that get to this state have some lovely names: spaghetti code, big balls of mud, and dirt field projects, just to name a few. What's more, this mess has an impact on how efficiently we can deliver working software, especially on distributed teams. In 1992, Ward Cunningham described this mess left in a software system as technical debt, and the name has stuck. Cunningham wrote, shipping first-time code is like going into debt, a little debt speeds…

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