Of course, but I was responding to the comment, which was about calling it "technical debt" vs. "technical drag".
We could just call it "technical venture capital". You make a large number of investments, the majority of which have absolutely no value to consumers. You abandon the losers, sometimes after much handwringing. It is usually impossible to tell a priori which features will be winners and which will be losers, though experience and good technical judgment can improve your odds. You can invest more in promising features to bring them to market quickly. Doing so usually introduces lots of warts into the codebase which will have to be fixed later - but then, you'll have lots of money later to fix them. But you have to be careful to avoid investing too much too early, before you've seen how the feature will actually play out, because then you build a giant monstrosity that collapses under its own weight before it can ever get to market.
Or we could accept that all metaphors are imperfect. I'm going to continue calling it "technical debt", because most people - even if they haven't heard of the term - have some idea what I'm talking about when I mention it.
We could just call it "technical venture capital". You make a large number of investments, the majority of which have absolutely no value to consumers. You abandon the losers, sometimes after much handwringing. It is usually impossible to tell a priori which features will be winners and which will be losers, though experience and good technical judgment can improve your odds. You can invest more in promising features to bring them to market quickly. Doing so usually introduces lots of warts into the codebase which will have to be fixed later - but then, you'll have lots of money later to fix them. But you have to be careful to avoid investing too much too early, before you've seen how the feature will actually play out, because then you build a giant monstrosity that collapses under its own weight before it can ever get to market.
Or we could accept that all metaphors are imperfect. I'm going to continue calling it "technical debt", because most people - even if they haven't heard of the term - have some idea what I'm talking about when I mention it.