Technical debt is not debt; it’s not even technical
Well, I did what the author suggested, and wrote down my definition. After a short internal dialog, I came up with this:<p>&quot;Technical debt is the burden that implementation choices may place on future development.&quot;<p>Nothing in the article leads me to think that this is either incoherent or irrelevant.<p>With regard to its coherence, I say that it is empirically verified: it actually happens!<p>The claim that it is not technical because it has consequences beyond the technical is a non-sequitur. Just about everything we do that is &#x27;technical&#x27; has implications and consequences that go beyond the technical: The mere fact that most of the technical things we choose to do are done for non-technical reasons is enough to establish that. The root cause of a problem and its broad consequences are separable concerns.<p>This formulation avoids the objection that its only debt if it is paid back in the same form as it taken out, but that was a tendentious claim anyway - it is completely reasonable to consider the situation where, say, I give a farmer cash in return for some produce at harvest time to be a debt. If we are going to be pedantic, the author might as well say that technical debt is not debt because it is not an exchange of money. Arguing over dictionary definitions is not going to lead to anything useful in this matter.