Accrued and compounded over time, technical debt increases with rigid IT architecture, dependent satellite applications and staff attrition. Custom architecture is common in just about every industry, and is powerful when first put online. Over time, though, the systems used become outdated and do not support newer technologies.

What is technical debt? Ward Cunningham, the developer of the Wiki concept and co-inventor of the foundations of Extreme Programming (XP), describes technical debt as a wonderful metaphor for having done things the quick but dirty way, setting yourself up with a technical debt to have to deal with later – a concept which is similar to a financial debt. Consultant Martin Fowler also likens technical debt to a financial debt – it incurs interest payments over time. This interest comes in the form of all the extra effort that is needed in future development due to the earlier quick-but-dirty design choice.

For example, if your core architecture is legacy-driven and you want to launch an e-commerce service, the IT department has to bend the core architecture to work with the newer technology. Legacy systems weren’t intended to “bend” in this manner, so now you have a custom code “bridge.” The new Web-based application is dependent on the core IT systems as a gateway to populate, authenticate and update key information for the company, customer and various financial bodies. All of these key connections require custom-coded “bridges.”

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