Which statement best describes technical debt?

• A. A hardware cost
• B. Suboptimal quick fixes that incur future work
• C. A licensing category
• D. A project management term unrelated to code

Answer: (B)

Technical debt is the extra work that accumulates when you take the quickest, often suboptimal route to ship a feature, such as quick fixes or sloppy design, instead of a proper, maintainable solution. Those shortcuts save time now but create future maintenance work—refactoring, fixing more bugs, and rewriting code or architecture to support future changes. It’s about the codebase and how decisions today affect future development, not about hardware costs, licensing categories, or a project management term unrelated to code.