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Software Engineering vocabulary · Code Review and Code Quality

Technical debt

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

/ˌteknɪkəl ˈdet/nounCommon term

In software engineering, technical debt means: The future cost of shortcuts taken in code today: quick solutions that save time now but make later changes slower and riskier.

In Turkish: teknik borç

How it is used

Often shortened to 'tech debt'. Teams take on, pay down, track and reduce technical debt, and ask for time to deal with it in planning: 'We need a sprint to pay down tech debt.'

Example sentences

  1. We took on some technical debt to hit the launch date.

  2. Every new feature is slow to build because of years of technical debt.

Common collocations

  • pay down technical debt
  • take on technical debt
  • reduce technical debt
  • tech debt ticket
  • refactorTo improve the structure of existing code, making it cleaner or easier to change, without changing what it does for the user.
  • legacy codeOld code that is still in use, often written by people who have left, with little documentation or few tests, so it feels risky to change.
  • code smellA sign in code that suggests a deeper design problem, such as a very long function, duplicated logic or too many parameters, even if the code works.
  • workaroundA temporary way to avoid a problem without really fixing it, so that work can continue until a proper solution is ready.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Code Review and Code Quality

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