What is technical debt?

TLDR: Cunningham coined the term in 1992. Later, the agile community adopted the term and it was used as a catch-all term to describe most problems with software. Researchers stepped in and provided academic definitions for the phenomenon. A pragmatic explanation of technical debt is “code that is more expensive to maintain than it should be.” Unless you actively mitigate such debt, it will add up and slow you down as a software company.

We provided a Quora answer that takes a historical perspective. Still worth a read! ;-)

https://www.quora.com/What-is-technical-debt/answer/Markus-Borg