[strogonoff]

My take on technical debt is that it’s a mismatch between requirements then and requirements now. And I don’t mean the written spec, I mean the dauntingly complete extent of requirements that exists mostly unverbalized in architect’s mind and applies to software’s existence in respective subject domain landscape over time (relating to maintenance effort, evolution of software, evolution of subject landscape, and so on).

I think the term “technical debt” is useful in the sense that it can do a good job of conveying the gist of the consequences of this mismatch that matter to people outside the development, without the above esoterics which I’d do a poor job at communicating (without confusing or alarming my target audience, anyway).