Okay, we all know the story. You need to add a small feature to an older project. Should be quick and easy, right? You’ve done it a thousand times. You open your favourite code editor and start digging. Oops. You now realize that the 3-hour job you initially envisioned has now turned into at least a day of fiddling around. Why is that? How did it happen? Two words: technical debt.

Technical what?

According to Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the metaphor, technical debt is the result of writing code that is easy to implement, rather than the best overall solution.

Technical…