[adamsilkey]

Most everyone agrees that technical debt is a real thing, but I don’t think we’ve landed on a widely accepted formal definition of what it is. Tech debt is so often used as a qualitative health term with no quantitative metrics behind it.

This paper establishes what it defines as tech debt, but it’s certainly not universal.

[kayo_20211030]

I don't think the paper actually defines what TD is. If it does, I can't find it. Isn't TD any code that goes to production? And, in this paper, code quality is whatever they say it is, or at least what their tool says it is. It's all a bit circular, don't you think?

[Izkata]

Technical debt is (was supposed to be, in its original meaning) an explicit decision to do something easy now that would have to be refactored/rewritten for something you know is coming later. You're trading time now for time from the future, that's why it was called "debt". It gets used colloquially for much more than that nowadays though.