Technical Debt: The Ultimate Antipattern - The Biggest Costs May Be hidden, Widespread, and Long Term

Software projects run the gamut from simple to complex, difficult to impossible and everything in between. Software project managers and their development teams must cope with and adapt to unforeseeable changes in nearly every aspect of the project as originally envisioned, scheduled and planned. In spite of all this turmoil and chaos systems get built, they work and at a later time are seen as having been created via a variety of imprudent development practices now collectively referred to as technical debt. This paper examines the hidden cost of expediency by probing what taking shortcuts does to productivity, morale and turnover on the project identifying debt that goes much deeper than technical.