#📚reference Technical investment is aligned with business goals and carefully calculated risk of improving an existing solution to respond to future needs. It is customary to perceive technical investment as the opposite of [[tech debt]]. However, it is important to remember that technical debt is related to the existing burden of suboptimal solutions, while technical investments focus on potential, contingent, or predicted problems. A simple example of a technical investment is setting up a proper [[continuous integration]] pipeline during the project initiation. A more complicated example is switching to a less-known technology with potential benefits by taking the risk that it might take too much time and effort to master. Automated testing is another good example of what is and what is not a technical investment. Testing your service responsible for populating user profiles from uploaded PDFs is a technical investment because by doing that, you may create a reliable piece of software that may never require special attention. But testing your payment service is not an investment. This is simply paying the technical debt because an untested payment system is immediately a shortcut, a burden, and, in most cases, an existential risk for your business. --- <font style="color: #F86759">Contributors:</font> [[Mykhailo]] <font style="color: #F86759">Last edited:</font> *2024-03-26*