Technical Debt in the Eye of the Beholder

Humor. Or is it?

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?. Yet another metaphor—perhaps useful—seeding the ever-growing silo of software analogies.

I'll be very quick on that.

If you write bad code once and no one ever is going to change it, the technical debt does not exist. But if not, beware... At least you may never learn to write great code.

This phenomenon find its reflection in Kruchten P., Managing Technical Debt (2019) book (p. 32) under the name "Principle 2: If You Do Not Incur Any Form of Interest, Then You Probably Do Not Have Actual Technical Debt" I reviewed here.