[mikewarot]

So it's really not technical debt, but rather cognitive debt? In Rumsfeldian, it is the difference between the current known knowns and the previous known unknowns. That hard won knowledge should be plowed into the source code, via refactoring, before it is lost.

Source code is the expression of knowledge about a problem that happens to be machine readable.

Test code is the expression of knowledge about how things can go wrong solving the problem, and it happens to be machine readable as well.

I agree that a sad aspect to this is the use of a money metaphor. Once the Silicon Valley types hear a finance term, they lock on to it as something to be optimized, and deployed as a tool. It leads people astray.