I agree, I tend to find myself assuming everything not "clean" is technical debt - putting things in these three buckets has helped (YMMV). 1. If you don't hav

I agree, I tend to find myself assuming everything not "clean" is technical debt - putting things in these three buckets has helped (YMMV). 1. If you don't have users, you don't have technical debt (you might have lot's of #2 though). You could frag the entire app and the only thing of value (not potential value) lost would be your job. Debt implies value was quickly received in exchange for a flexible re-payment schedule (of time in this case, not money); if the code is not actively being used to save/spend/gain some resource then that value exchange has not happened yet. 2. Correct Code* that is unclean and could be improved in <= time that it took to write is just bad code. Fix this code now. 3. Correct Code that is unclean and would take significantly more time to improve than it took to write is technical debt (but only if you have users). This is where a balance needs to be struck between business needs and development needs. Manage this code carefully. *code that correctly implements business logic, incorrect code is always bad - no matter how long it took to write.