We all experience technical debt when building software, especially software that has been around for years. Most of us have likely encountered code that we are loathe to touch and modify. At least, we don't touch it twice. We might change things once, but when it doesn't work as expected, most of us put it back in it's previous state and move on to something else.

At the same time, it's hard to define what technical debt is or point it out to managers, who often can't grasp the concept of why technical debt matters to a development team. They can't understand the reasons why new code built on older code takes longer and longer to produce. It's a nebulous concept that can baffle both people new to software development and those with years of experience.

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