It becomes technical debt. Just like financial debt costs you the interest rate times the amount owed, technical debt costs you time and resources spent on refactoring and cleaning up the code, rather than on activities that directly increase revenue, say, adding new features.
One thing that makes technical debt particularly problematic is that you can incur in it without knowing it. Unlike the case with financial debt, where it's impossible to “accidentally” borrow money. But, just because technical debt is hard to measure, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
> reducing development time and cost can be done without questionable decisions so without incurring any debt.
In principle, yes. In practice, the most common way to reduce development costs, at least in the short term, is to incur in technical debt.
> They should rename their method from "remodeling" to "debt restructuring" or "refinancing". Of course, the middleman always gets paid.
> One thing that makes technical debt particularly problematic is that you can incur in it without knowing it. Unlike the case with financial debt, where it's impossible to “accidentally” borrow money.
Debt doesn't occur only because of agreements to borrow, it can occur because you've incurred a liability by some other means. Which, yes, can occur accidentally.
Indeed, cutting development corners arguably risks incurring technical debt that will manifest concretely later in a process much more like cutting physical construction corners might risk negligence liability down the road and less like deliberate, planned debt financing vs. paying cash upfront for construction.
It becomes technical debt. Just like financial debt costs you the interest rate times the amount owed, technical debt costs you time and resources spent on refactoring and cleaning up the code, rather than on activities that directly increase revenue, say, adding new features.
One thing that makes technical debt particularly problematic is that you can incur in it without knowing it. Unlike the case with financial debt, where it's impossible to “accidentally” borrow money. But, just because technical debt is hard to measure, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
> reducing development time and cost can be done without questionable decisions so without incurring any debt.
In principle, yes. In practice, the most common way to reduce development costs, at least in the short term, is to incur in technical debt.
> They should rename their method from "remodeling" to "debt restructuring" or "refinancing". Of course, the middleman always gets paid.
No disagreement here.