technical debt

known or unknown parts of programs that are currently suboptimal and should be refactored.

— DevOps for the Modern Enterprise, Mirco Hering

cost of software rework that needs to be incurred at a future time, often coming from a simpler solution being done to complete work instead of applying a better approach that would take longer to complete.

— Project to Product, Mik Kersten

The discrepancy between the internals of your system and the ideal. Given a particular set of functions that code implements, the internals of the code and infrastructure can be better or worse in terms of maintainability, quality, scalability, security, and so on. Any differences from the ideal have a cost to the company, although the cost might not be apparent on the surface: technical debt might cause later changes to the system to take longer, may limit what the system can be made to do, may have hidden security vulnerabilities, or may provide a comfortable hiding place for bugs. I distinguish technical debt from functional debt (see above), which is the gaps from the ideal functionality; technical debt refers only to the hidden internals of the system, not the functionality that users see.

— War and Peace and IT: Glossary, Mark Schwartz

Technical debt arises when the development team takes a shortcut to release a feature more quickly, leaving known imperfections in the code

— A Seat at the Table, in “6 - Transformation”, Mark Schwartz

When we say tech debt, we are describing, essentially, what we think is the future value of the codebase.

— Denali Lumma · From Technical Debt to Technical Capital, Las Vegas 2023 · at 3:12