Hopefully by now it has become apparent that it is nearly impossible to avoid accumulating technical debt while building software and systems. The question is not so much whether or not you are going to take on technical debt but rather how quickly, what kind and what you are going to do about it in the long term.

Naïve/Reckless/Unintentional Technical Debt aka Mess Naïve Debt, Reckless Debt and Unintentional debt are different names for a form of technical debt that accrues due to irresponsible behavior or immature practices on the part of the people involved. In our experience it is very rare to find this kind of technical debt stemming from conscious irresponsible development behavior. However, it is very common to find this kind of debt originating from developers not trained in current and robust development techniques, when little architectural planning has taken place or the toolchain the development team uses is immature.

Technical debt, while over two decades old, is a term very much of the essence in this age of Agile development, Lean startups, Minimum Viable Products and DevOps practices. Technical debt has been a phenomenon since the first mainframe punchcard but with a much broader swath of our economy being dominated by businesses viewing themselves as “software companies” and “product development” referring to software more often than any durable good, an increasingly broad set of stakeholders feel the effects of technical debt.

I try, at least once every couple months, to read a book that is not directly about software development, Scrum, etc. My thinking is that all tech and no business makes Don a dull boy; I really need to develop myself as a leader and developer of employees as much or more than a curator of custom applications. I recently finished reading Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull, one of the founders of Pixar. I found so much in a couple of value-packed pages that I want to share them and show it through my personal Scrum/software development lens.