[andi999]

It is not the same. Financial debt has to be on the balance sheet; technical debt is not. My point is the a finance/business guy will think in the totally wrong direction with what you actually mean. Also to whom do you repay technical debt?

[tsbischof]

It really should be on some form of balance sheet, in the form of "costs to implement new feature" (debt gets repaid in part by the next customer) or "costs to maintain" (ongoing interest payments that come out of overhead). The big issue with throwing around terms relating to complexity without assigning projected value or probability distribution for that value is that it makes any discussion asymmetric. As someone who knows something about the processes involved but does not have deep knowledge of the code base, it is impossible for me to accurately predict the tradeoffs in discussions. So when we do have to build project plans and discuss tradeoffs, I have to either rely on the people doing the work to build one-off projections or otherwise make things up the best I can based on general patterns.