Software Architecture · Cluster
Technical Debt
Interest, principal, and repayment strategy.
- 01 Principal, Interest, and Upkeep in the Technical Debt Model What the debt metaphor actually quantifies: a one-time restoration cost, a recurring surcharge on future changes, and the arithmetic that decides whether repayment ever pays.
- 02 Change Amplification: How Coupling Sets the Price of an Edit Why a one-line rule change can require edits in seven files, how to tell legitimate breadth from amplification, and which couplings multiply the cost of every future change.
- 03 Divergent Duplicates and the Cost of Two Truths How two copies of one business rule drift apart without any build failing, why the drift is expensive to resolve, and how to detect divergence before deciding which copy is right.
- 04 Measuring Debt Without Inventing Numbers Complexity, size, churn, and coupling each measure something different, and none of them measures interest. How to build a debt inventory whose numbers change a decision.
- 05 Feedback Latency as Compounding Interest A slow test suite charges every change a fixed toll and inflates batch size, which makes each failure harder to diagnose. The queueing mechanics behind that second effect.
- 06 Compatibility Promises as Borrowed Time Publishing a contract converts a one-time edit into an open-ended obligation. Which changes are actually breaking, and how client tolerance determines what a server may do.
- 07 Data Shape Debt and the Migration That Outlives the Code Stored records encode design mistakes that redeployment cannot undo, and the expand-contract sequence that makes an online change safe leaves debts of its own.
- 08 Sequencing Repayment Under a Fixed Capacity With more debt than capacity, the order of repayment determines the total benefit. Ranking by interest eliminated per week of work, subject to deadlines and prerequisites.
- 09 Tacit Design Knowledge and the Cost of Unwritten Decisions Code records what the system does and discards why, so the constraints behind each structure survive only in memory. What decays, what it costs, and which artifacts carry rationale.
- 10 Reversibility as the Currency of Architectural Decisions Decisions differ less in how good they are than in what it costs to undo them. How to classify one-way doors, what preserving an option costs, and how to test a rollback path.