[andi999]

Bigger question:"whom do they owe the debt to?" - "to themselves" - "oh, then just strike it off"

of course thats a silly answer: "to the code base" - "who owns the code base" - "the company" - "well then lets just get rid of that 'code base thingy'"

[moffkalast]

Well if you delete the codebase you no longer have any tech debt, problem is technically solved. Big brain time.

[andi999]

Exactly. So obviously the code base is an asset. If one then want to define technical debt it is more like the difference of the value of the code base compared to the imagined/perceived value of the code base. But this does not help with anything as well, since you could also just adjust the perceived value of the code base to reduce technical debt.

[gnulinux]

You cannot reduce the perceived value of the codebase in most cases since the value is already communicated with the customer, there might even be contracts, and SLAs.

[marcosdumay]

> compared to the imagined/perceived value

I guess the word you are looking for is "necessary".