Can Technical Debt Constitute a Breach of Implied Warranties?
Photo credit: Dancing Lemur (Flickr) Cunnigham’s quip “A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite” is intuitively very clear. We are talking about short-term debt which will be reduced, and hopefully eliminated in entirety, at the earliest possible time. The question this post addresses is what happens when the expected short-term technical debt becomes a significant long-term debt? Specifically, can technical debt under some conditions constitute a breach of implied warranties? In his InformIT article Don’t “Enron” Your Software Project, Aaron Erickson coined the term “Technical Fraud” and connected it to Lemmon Laws: As a reaction to seeing this condition and its deleterious effects, I coined the term technical fraud to refer to the practice of incurring unmanaged and hidden technical debt. Many U.S. states have “lemon laws” that make it illegal to knowingly sell someone a car that has undisclosed maintenance problems. Selling a “lemon” is a f
