I dislike the term Technical Debt
5 or so years ago a manager at my company, Leon Messerschmidt , gave a talk to our engineering department called “Why I don’t use the term Technical Debt and you shouldn’t either” and since then I’ve wanted to write my own view on this. Before then I had felt uncomfortable with the term, it seemed very subjective. In the talk Leon described how the term debt was often viewed as a good thing by people with a financial background (as he had) and so gave the wrong impression to non-engineering stakeholders. What Leon advocated for was instead a “Tidy as you go” approach, which reflects a lot of what Kent Beck went on to describe in his series of blog posts and book : If you only have a minute to read, here are the classic software design blunders: Thou shalt not rewrite the whole system. Thou shalt not pause delivery of features for an extended period to fix the design. Thou shalt not delay the first feature to "get the design right". Thou shalt not thoughtlessly demand the...