Here's another way to look at it. Technical debt is real when you see it first when looking forward, before it's realized. Technical debt is bogus when you see

Here's another way to look at it. Technical debt is real when you see it first when looking forward, before it's realized. Technical debt is bogus when you see it first when looking backwards, after it's 'realized.' Like real debt, it doesn't just 'appear' without a conscious decision to incur it. For example, a system was built crappily, and you refer to it later on as incurred technical debt. bzzt wrong, if you didn't call it technical debt when the system was being built, it probably was just a mess and now you're calling it technical debt to hide the crappiness.