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A Daily Lexicon of Trustworthy Data

005·15

documentation debt

/ˌdɒkjʊmɛnˈteɪʃən dɛt/ - n.

1 [colloq.] The distance between the wiki and the warehouse, compounding every sprint and paid by whoever onboards next.Keep. Punchy.This is the problem.

Working definition

2. The accumulating gap between how a system actually behaves and what its documentation describes.

Evidence

See also

data dictionaryA faithful description of the column named 'cust_status_2_final', whose meaning died with its author.
data quality debtThe interest paid every quarter on the validation skipped to make one deadline two years ago.
tribal knowledgeThe real documentation, sharded across the people most likely to resign.