reddit

“In the past two years I’ve heard the term Technology Debt thrown around to justify a number of technology decisions.  In an effort to come up with a term that would bridge the business-technology gap, someone came up with Technology Debt to indicate that you were basically creating a future liability that would have to be paid back - rewriting a section of code or switching out a module, whatever.  Since business folks deal with assets and liabilities routinely, expressing subtle technology problems in financial terms has a lot of appeal.  The basic concept is most frequently used in relationship to software: Let’s say you defer something to a future release so you can get the release out the door.  Perhaps the feature will only work for very few customers but you don’t have time to generalize it, or the solution won’t scale as new users are added.” source...