Is this a real concept or is it something that people from previously communist countries invented to B.S. the hell out of Amercans to get away with shoddy work and poor productivity?
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Spot on @N48Fkx0-1mcs ! Technical debt is pure Wall Street nonsense. Imagine if you want to build a bridge and the engineers said just put a couple of logs together, make it sturdy enough so that cars can drive on them and use the bridge however rickety it is, as we will add concrete and make it reinforced later on when we have time! We can also figure out the design later as that would waste time right now!
This would not work in the real, physical world so why should it work well in software?
Exactly, it's BS. Just an excuse to sideline people and have their work re-done by someone else so that they can make the next layoff list.
The whole point of "Agile" Development is to have it done quickly without wasting time on details like flexible, extensible architecture to allow for modifications and growth over time. Agile says that it's just easy enough or better to just re-build the system with whatever is needed at a later point to accommodate changes, growth etc. so don't worry about good architecture or making it "perfect" as it can just be re-built at a later point!
So Technical Debt is just a gift from our "commie" friends who don't know what accounting terms really mean anyway.
My experience is technical debt offered up from sufficiently capable architects can be a positive thing. Flaw in that is the shortage of the same. My need to have them raised is few because I insist on doing great shyte and usually rules the day but in a pinch they can be effective
Agile and BAC? Will never work.
No, actually its a real thing. If you implement a feature quickly just to cover a single scenario, commonly done if doing a proof-of-concept, but it doesn't know how to fail gracefully in an unexpected different scenario, then you have accrued technical debt as you must go back after the fact and make it respond properly. An example, was the remote control for Drones, they did all of the work to make it connect properly, and to control the item, but they didn't try and implement communications encryption until they had all the other bugs worked out. If you got the build that worked, but didn't support encrypted communications, then that build had a very important piece of technical debt.
As Agile development takes hold, you are going to see more and more technical debt, since they are rushing to ship and they can fill that debt in at a later date with a pushed update.
I am not saying I like it, but it is what is happening.
The Alternative to letting a product ship with technical debt is that the initial release of a product will be 2 years from now, instead of 6 months from now with an update each few months to fill in gaps.