[wpietri]

Truth. The only time I consider something temporary is when the business stakeholder asking for the temporary change has a) promised b) a specific period c) when the cleanup happens, and d) they have a track record of honoring their promises.

And I encourage everybody to make that their standard. Now I never cut a corner without that. I never even offer. My default is a zero-additional-tech-debt approach, because that's the only thing I think is responsible or sustainable. If there's a legitimate business need for taking on a bit of tech debt, I will propose the deal of splitting the work into, say, "experiment" and "cleanup", but cleanup ends up in the workstream with a date attached. If the stakeholder accepts the deal but fails to honor it, I revoke their tech-debt credit card.