"Technical debt" as a catch-all is not ideal, but it's usually an easier sell than "We need to start looking at and fixing the never-ending procession of short-sighted and slipshod decisions that you, management, and you, lazy developers, have apparently booked for a year-round appearance in our codebase."
The problem is that "technical debt" has no bearing on the business functioning of any company whose primary deliverable is not a piece of technology. At best, it's seen as a sort of odd thing that suddenly causes schedules to slip and engineers to quit; at worst, it's dismissed out-of-hand and ignored.
There is really no good way of explaining to non-software-engineers why technical debt is a big deal in such a way that they prioritize it as something to be addressed. The article's suggestion that you break it down into actionable items fails: technical debt can't be explained in terms of any individual issue, because the problem isn't any particular issue--and if you try to do it that way, each issue invites a hacky solution that drives you further into debt!
It's a culture, it's craftsmanship, it's ownership, and it's quality that are attacked by technical debt. It's how you guarantee that only malicious geniuses and shitty developers stay on your project.
The problem is that "technical debt" has no bearing on the business functioning of any company whose primary deliverable is not a piece of technology. At best, it's seen as a sort of odd thing that suddenly causes schedules to slip and engineers to quit; at worst, it's dismissed out-of-hand and ignored.
There is really no good way of explaining to non-software-engineers why technical debt is a big deal in such a way that they prioritize it as something to be addressed. The article's suggestion that you break it down into actionable items fails: technical debt can't be explained in terms of any individual issue, because the problem isn't any particular issue--and if you try to do it that way, each issue invites a hacky solution that drives you further into debt!
It's a culture, it's craftsmanship, it's ownership, and it's quality that are attacked by technical debt. It's how you guarantee that only malicious geniuses and shitty developers stay on your project.