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Discussion on: Software Maintenance, Understanding the 4 Types

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Eljay-Adobe

Looks like what I call "technical debt" is federated in those buckets.

I distinguish between internal technical debt, versus external technical debt.

Internal technical debt is "we took some shortcut so we could ship, but as a result the code in that area is a mess... if we're going to keep this code going forward we HAVE to address it at some point in time". Hmmm, Predictive: cost of not doing?

External technical debt are things like "The OS changed on us, Windows now requires XPS for printing, and macOS deprecated all the FSSpec and FSRef APIs in 10.8" or "C++17 is out, and most of our code is still C++98". Hmmm, Adaptive: triggers - changing landscape?