Back to ❮ 18F Blog

Conventional wisdom often encourages engineers to start with a big architectural overview, but this kind of a grand plan usually leads to technical-debt. Instead of using an architecture-first plan, you should focus on user experience design and software design to help your project avoid technical debt.

In the final part of our series on technical debt, we talk about ways to minimize accumulating bad or unnecessary technical debt in the first place.

In the last post in this series, we talked about the potential consequences of having a lot of technical debt. Now, we’ll give you concrete steps to identify and then manage that technical debt so it doesn’t get out of hand.

In part two of our series on technical debt, we define what technical debt is and how it can negatively impact your organization or project.

Technical debt is a financial metaphor that software developers use to talk to managers about the “hidden” costs associated with a system’s architecture and codebase. Over a series of upcoming posts, we’re going to explain what technical debt is, how to manage it, and some ways to prevent accumulating it.