[zugi]

> "Technical debt is the burden that implementation choices may place on future development"

True, provided we understand that those choices are not always conscious. I more commonly use the term looking back: some code technically works and at least minimally satisfies current use cases, but is hard to read and therefore hard to maintain or extend and bug-prone, so it needs to be refactored, improved, and/or modernized.

Before the term "technical debt" existed, it could be hard for developers to convince management of the need to clean up existing code. It sounded like just some thing that crazy programmers wanted to do - spend time and money for something that delivered nothing new. Now managers can understand the need to pay off "technical debt."

[a9h74j]

> looking back .. minimally satisfies .. is hard to read

Interesting. I wonder if there is an analogy to the first draft of a book. Everything needs "editing" -- that is a given. Some writing only needs line editing; some needs a restructuring, a rewrite, etc.