Defining Technical Debt. Has everybody been getting it "wrong"?

Technical debt is one of those concepts that has both gained a lot of traction over the last few years, and in some ways been misused as a concept quite heavily. It seems that nearly anything and everything that people don't like about a code base gets lumped into a broad technical debt category, so it's getting harder for people to define with clarity what technical debt actually is as the concept becomes more and more muddied but people's perceptions as to what it is they are looking at when they perceive technical debt. Contributing to this lack of clarity is the need to be able to quantify this debt, and to measure it in a meaningful way. The problem is however, that technical debt isn't like bank loan, where you accrue a fixed amount of debt and you pay it of bit by bit, and I can't help but think that for many, the definition of the word Debt has left many feeling that it is something very specific. For others, the issue is that everything they do incurs a measure of "debt" that negatively impacts on the product, so there is a kind of underlying hysteria that leads some people to believe that they need to measure every little thing about their software development, and that somehow they can see a report that will pinpoint where the problems lie. The reality however is both much more subtle, and perhaps much simpler than many people are leading themselves to believe.

Why is it that Agile is so misunderstood?

Software development is an often misunderstood game. When you tell a complete non-technical stranger that you are a Software Developer, they will often respond with questions such as: "So you're into computers?", or "So you make games?", or even "Can you help me with my computer problem?". Clearly these people have no idea what software development is, and when you attempt to explain how you do what you do, they nod, and do their best to look impressed, yet you can see that they are thinking things like: "I have no idea what this guy is going on about", or they find a quick way to change the subject. This is all to be expected and barely registers with me any more. I am however quite perplexed to have observed over the last few years just how misunderstood software development is by many of the people who are themselves software developers!

I remember being told during the early 80's by every adult who asked me what I wanted to do as a career that I should get into computers because everybody would have one one day and would need experts to make them do stuff. Clearly those predictions came true, and it appears that I wasn't the only kid to heed the advice of his wiser elders at the time - actually I told everyone that I wanted to do something else so that I could look rebellious when I would decide to change to do all that "geek stuff" later on! The thing is, while there are a lot of software developers out there, not all of them appear to be able to claim to be very good at what they do, even after 10's of years of experience. Yes, that was yet another bold statement for me to make, but I have a good reason for believing this, and I might even have an explanation or two for why this is.