Technical Debt is a term with similar ramifications in the realm of [[Enterprise Architecture]] and software development. EA Technical Debt (or Architecture Debt) is the amount of IT resources (technologies, applications, databases) you have that are out of alignment with desired long-term "to-be" states (what would be depicted in [[EA Landscapes]]), or with [[EA Standards]]. Software technical debt is code that was written to be _fast_ rather than _scalable & maintainable_ - perhaps by forgoing [[Test-Driven Development]], allowing [[Documentation Rot]] (or forgoing documentation at all), or through a lack of coordination between team members. Technical debt is "taken on" when some tactical choice is made by someone with enough influence/power to move a solution to production even though it doesn't adhere to the desired [[Enterprise Architecture]]. **Like all other debts, technical debt must be paid**. This looks like either: ripping out the undesirable technology from the solution at some later date and paying to replace it with something that _is_ alignment with IT's desired tech stack - **OR** the cost of having to maintain many separate & different tools that service the same function. This requires more people, more effort, and ultimately reduces your company's [[Agile|agility]], # Examples ## Baked Into a Process - We don't want to wait for a developer to build a report like what's needed, so we have the new guy run a couple of other reports then jam them together using Excel. - **Debt**: the on-going production of the custom report costs person-hours & increases risk ## Favorite Language - A ragtag team of coding-capable people decide they can build their own solution, and use their favorite language from college to do it rather than the _standard_ language used for solutions across the business. - **Debt**: maintaining the new solution requires employees with knowledge of Cobol (or whatever) ## Favorite Database - A pioneering young tech savvy business person makes an Access Database to enable some necessary & valuable on-going business capability. - **Debt**: Now you have an Access Database. The worst debt of all. **** # More ## Source - [[The Practice of Enterprise Architecture]] ## Related