Ur-Technical Debt

Discusses the term "technical debt". It’s so prevalent that we shorten it to tech debt or even just TD. What counts as technical debt has expanded over the years, which has caused many people to lose sight of the interesting phenomena that Ward Cunningham was talking about when he coined the term in 1992. Today, any code that a developer dislikes is branded as technical debt. Tech debt is also hacky code, code written by novices, code written without consideration of software architecture (so-called big balls of mud), and code with antipatterns flagged by static analysis tools.