A monetary metaphor for technical debt implies a freedom to the order of addressing technical debt that is deceptive. This comes from money's fungible nature: i

A monetary metaphor for technical debt implies a freedom to the order of addressing technical debt that is deceptive. This comes from money's fungible nature: if you have many debts, you can pay off whichever debt you want and you can pay it off in parts. I think this metaphor does a good job of capturing the path-dependant nature of debt. How the size of each individual debt sits in the shadow of the code that relies on the flawed code. Understanding that there's the work of fixing technical debt and the work of getting to the place where you can fix technical debt feels more clearly communicated by tetris than by financial debt.