Ward Explains Debt Metaphor

A great explanation of behind the metaphor of “tech debt”.

I coined the debt metaphor to explain the refactoring that we were doing...It was important to me that we accumulate the learnings we did about the application over time by modifying the program to look as if we had known what we were doing all along...The explanation I gave to my boss, and this was financial software, was a financial analogy I called “the debt metaphor”

With borrowed money you can do something sooner than you might otherwise, but then until you pay back that money you’ll be paying interest. I thought borrowing money was a good idea, I thought that rushing software out the door to get some experience with it was a good idea, but that of course, you would eventually go back and as you learned things about that software you would repay that loan by refactoring the program to reflect your experience as you acquired it.

A lot of bloggers at least have explained the debt metaphor and confused it, I think, with the idea that you could write code poorly with the intention of doing a good job later and thinking that that was the primary source of debt. I'm never in favor of writing code poorly, but I am in favor of writing code to reflect your current understanding of a problem even if that understanding is partial.