Are bugs part of technical debt?

Re:Are bugs part of technical debt? by ams6110 on Thursday December 13, 2012 @09:30AM (#4915776)

I don't view technical debt as the possibility that your code may break in the future if changes are introduced. That's a given no matter how careful you are. Technical debt to me is a conscious decision to take a current benefit in exchange for a future cost. "I know this implementation has flaws which we will need to revisit before we go live, but I can implement it in 30 minutes and have it ready for tomorrow's demo vs. spending a week researching and developing something production-ready."

Many people now use the term "technical debt" as a cover for "developer incompetence" though.

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Re:Are bugs part of technical debt? by thinkstoomuch on Thursday December 13, 2012 @11:31AM (#4916419)

To me, technical debt comes in both the intentional and non-intentional form (and more often than not, the latter). In fact, I'm a firm believer that all software tends toward entropy, so feature additions inherently add to technical debt if conscious care and refactoring is not taken.

Technical debt (to me) is measured in "extra time to add the next feature", however in practice this measurement is impossible, as your control is a theoretical application with the debt removed.

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