| Not to yourself; you often inherit the debt from previous developers (who may have left). The project accrues technical debt. And it owes it to the users. Because, ultimately, that's who all these FTE hours (the currency borrowed!) are going to. By taking a shortcut now, you make an implicit promise to the user to rewrite things later (on behalf of the project). It's the user that suffers if the debt is not repaid (by experiencing bugs, missing features, slow releases, paying for higher headcount to fix bugs, etc). Shortcuts don't become debt unless the user is affected. If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid. And it is the user that will dump your project if that debt is never repaid. The debt analogy holds water. |