The Past, Present and Future of Technical Debt: Learning from the Past to Prepare for the Future

While technical debt has emerged as a formal concept relatively recently we have had technical debt from the earliest days of software development, it has simply evolved in nature. So what can we learn from past types of technical debt to allow us to prepare for its future forms? When we look back over recent software history, we can see identifiable evolutions of software systems, each one roughly aligning with a decade. In this talk we will explore what technical debt has meant during each era of software systems and what this might mean for technical debt in the future.