I've found the Technical Debt metaphor to be extremely helpful, especially when conversing with non-technical project stakeholders. The web is full of anecdotes about technical debt, but most of them never go beyond the basic notions of "accruing debt" and making "interest payments." I believe the we could go much deeper with this metaphor.

In the financial world, debt comes in many shapes and colors: short-term, long-term, collateralized, fixed-rate, floating-rate, installment, balloon, callable, convertible, and so on. And pricing that debt (i.e. determining the interest rate) is a complex calculation based on numerous risk factors such as default risk, exchange-rate risk, inflation risk, call risk, etc.

If we apply these concepts to software development and technical debt, perhaps we can develop the same kind of sophisticated models that are used for financial debt. In practice, these models usually require quantitative data that are rarely available in software development. But putting that aside, I wonder if we could at least produce some compelling theories.

I don't have a strong background in finance, so I just wanted to put the idea out there and see if my fellow Monks have any thoughts to contribute.

Thanks for sharing.

-Jeff

In reply to RFC: Exploring Technical Debt by jthalhammer

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