[philwelch]

It also depends on the lifecycle of the application. Some applications only exist for 2-3 years, just because of requirements changes; at that point, it's easier to "declare bankruptcy" by deprecating the old code base.

0% interest isn't the best analogy for technical debt, however, because technical debt often carries recurring costs that are analogous to interest. Every time you have to make changes or enhancements to a technically indebted system, the cost of those changes in time, effort, complexity, and bug hazard is higher than it would be in a clean system.

[jldugger]

> 0% interest isn't the best analogy for technical debt, because technical debt often carries recurring costs that are analogous to interest.

My argument is simply that if there is no recurring cost, it's not technical debt. It's just imperfect software that still works without demonstrated problems.