IMHO there are parallels with "physical" engineering if you look carefully. Here are some examples: 1) We figure out that asbestos is bad, mmkay. Now suddenly

IMHO there are parallels with "physical" engineering if you look carefully. Here are some examples: 1) We figure out that asbestos is bad, mmkay. Now suddenly half of the buildings have a need to perform expensive maintenance work even though their business needs for "features" have not changed - that's analogous to finding a security vulnerability in a subsystem or protocol that's not even your own but that your system uses, where fixing that may take a lot of work. 2) For electric wiring. You may have a building wired properly according to code requirements as it was in 1950. Nowadays we have a better understanding of what's safe and not, and while you're often not required to fix that immediately, in many places you wouldn't be allowed to "just" do minor changes - if you do alterations, then after you're done that place must be meet the current code requirements, which may require extensive expensive work. This has a clear analogy to the type of technical debt caused by relying on an obsolete version of some dependency - adding small new stuff may force you to do integration work so that your system works with a newer version of that dependency. 3) Another example of electric wiring - you may sometimes encounter improper work done that way to save time or money because of some urgent deadline. And you can't just come in and make up the missing parts later - fixing it often requires simply ripping all of it out and putting in the wires properly; so if it's not a temporary place that's up for demolishing soon (just as with software, temporary structures also sometimes stay used much, much longer than planned) then you need to re-do it eventually if you want to keep using it safely. And there are cases just like that in software. People handling construction and reconstruction projects, as well as all their customers, have some understanding of these concepts when it applies to the physical world, and it's not that surprising to them (well, the costs for the tasks mentioned above are sometimes unpleasantly surprising) - so perhaps we should frame it in similar terminology to piggyback off of these analogies instead of debt?