[nichochar]

I personally don't like the term debt. It's a simple analogy but it doesn't go very far.

The biggest issue by far around tech debt, which has been covered thoroughly throughout this thread, is that measuring it is tricky.

Measuring financial debt is trivial, you can put a dollar amount on it. Measuring tech debt is very subjective, as it depends on the level of seniority of your team, their ability/authorization to make changes (in banking, you can change nothing, in a startup, you can change everything), attrition rate, etc...

It's such a complicated equation, that using the term debt tricks upper management (non technical) to think it's easy to predict: it really isn't at all.