Toward a Galvanizing Definition of Technical Debt

Everyone involved in software development seems to know what Technical Debt is. It’s a powerful metaphor. In Ward Cunningham’s original formulation, Technical Debt was the accumulated distance between your understanding of the domain and the understanding that the system reflects. We all start out with some understanding of a problem, and we write code to solve that problem. But, we learn as we go. If the code doesn’t keep up with that learning, we have to continually stumble over a conceptua...