Yea, I was going to say the same thing. Work undone as part of prioritization is not debt. Debt to me is causing more work than it would take otherwise so that

Yea, I was going to say the same thing. Work undone as part of prioritization is not debt. Debt to me is causing more work than it would take otherwise so that less work can be done now (or because the developer / architect just doesn't know any better). Using a switch statement instead of a factory. Using role based auth instead of attribute based. Things like that. The problem is, the debt metaphor is not being applied correctly. Not doing future work now does not take on responsibility for the future work - so it's not like taking a loan. Doing work in a way that commits the team to extra work that didn't exist before - that's like taking on a loan. For instance, I don't want to do this 80 points of work now, so I'm going to ship the same requirement by doing 40 points of work on a solution that will take another 60 points to get to the original 80 point solution which is the way we know we have to go long term. I just borrowed 20 points on behalf of the team.