Is Technical Debt Just a Metaphor?

I’ve been hearing people talk a lot more about Technical Debt recently. I’m glad. Anything we can do to play more attention to long term quality is good. Technical Debt is a valuable frame for those discussions. No one wants to be in an impossible situation and teams that keep accumulating Technical Debt often end up there. It’s a land of risky rewrites - which are essentially an attempt to dig out of a hole.

When I wrote Toward a Galvanizing Definition of Technical Debt what I was doing was...