# The True Meaning of Technical Debt 💸 - Refactoring

<https://refactoring.fm/p/the-true-meaning-of-technical-debt>

- Host: [refactoring.fm](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/hosts/refactoring.fm/)
- Saved: April 15, 2021 (2021-04-16T01:13:16Z)
- Record: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/252e2525eff9/
- JSON: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/252e2525eff9.json

## What Jamie wrote

I've used the term technical debt and people I work with use it as well. I’m not a huge fan of it because I don't think it does a good job clearly communicating the issue. With that said, I’m a bit embarrassed to say I had no idea [Ward Cunningham](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham) coined the term and [the video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqeJFYwnkjE) included in this article is an astoundingly clear way to describe it, and **very different** than I've ever heard in two decades in tech.

> Ward is the original inventor of the "Technical Debt" term, and it's revealing to hear the sentence in which this metaphor was used the first time (emphases are mine):
> 
> > If we fail to make the program aligned with what we understand to be the proper way to think about our [...] objects, then we are going to continuously stumble into disagreement, and that would slow us down like paying interest on a loan.
> 
> Ward describes debt as the natural result of writing code about something we don't have a proper understanding of.
> 
> He doesn't talk of poor code — which he says accounts for a very minor share of debt.
> 
> He talks of disagreement between business needs and how the software has been written. 

This brought me back to [Pragmatic Product Management](https://www.pragmaticinstitute.com), and making sure that you really know **the problem** you are trying to solve. If you don't, not only are you likely to create a poor solution, you are also almost certainly going to create technical debt.

Framing this metaphor this way is so much more powerful than how it is typically used.

## Facts

- Kind: [Page](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/kinds/page/)

## Appears in

- [WT182: Weekly Thing #182 / Technical Debt, Identity, Neeva](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/182/), Must Read

## Mentions

- [Debt Metaphor - YouTube](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/3df74cc3b06f/) (youtube.com, August 7, 2014)

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## Elsewhere

- Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://refactoring.fm/p/the-true-meaning-of-technical-debt