Software teams celebrate “Done” as a success—but what does “Done” really mean? A feature isn’t truly “finished” just because it’s running in production. It carries ongoing costs: bugs, maintenance, dependencies, and refactoring. Saying “Done” without accounting for the long-term effort is a commitment that will follow the team for years.

The term “technical debt” is misleading. Debt can be repaid—but software is not a loan; it’s a property that requires continuous upkeep. A better concept is “technical maintenance”: How do we keep recurring costs low? How do we avoid entangling ourselves in growing maintenance obligations with every new feature?

This talk analyzes why our understanding of “Done” is problematic and presents strategies to keep technical maintenance low—fostering sustainable software development instead of an ever-growing maintenance nightmare.