These days I get riled up about the word "technical" and the general absence of risk in these conversations about "debt". I wrote a long post [1], which basical

These days I get riled up about the word "technical" and the general absence of risk in these conversations about "debt". I wrote a long post [1], which basically says: 1. The "Technical" word pigeonholes responsibility to the "technical" people. This creates all manner of problems (management, strategy, resource allocation etc.). It ought to be seen as "Software" debt, because the whole software company owns it. 2. Software debt packages risk. We need better mental models of that risk. - This perception is commonly muddied by personal bias---how we think of finances and debt in our daily lives. - However, it requires thinking like a strategist and/or economist (much more abstract, nuanced terms). The trouble is that the "debt" is rooted in complexity, which, like rocket mass, is inevitable. And we abhor it because solving for complexity is like solving for rocket mass; requires recursive tree-networked thinking. - The debt is also inevitable because we want some complexity (rocket mass). It's just that it needs be the exact kind we need, which choice-making is difficult. - This sort of complexity-debt always compounds and each decision to add or remove items from any part of the system changes the principal and the rate of interest and the repayment terms. - It is layered because software parts compose into software "stacks" and hierarchies, and each part mutates/evolves up and down the towers. - It is networked. Because software itself is networked. Small local changes can turn into literal chain reactions of events. The meltdown of Knight Capital stands out starkly as an example of unmitigated, un-hedged software debt. Ultimately, the "debt" part of "software debt" is better seen as if it were a complex opaque financial derivative. Unchecked creation of software debt is exactly analogous to how the 2008 financial crisis came to be. It's all composed of "simple" debt. Much as I dislike all this doom-speak, I have to acknowledge it is material, and to side with Andy Grove. Only the paranoid survive. The only real hedge we have is the creativity and intelligence of our people. More at my blog post here: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/software-debt/ https://www.evalapply.org/posts/software-debt/