I worked with Ward Cunningham for about a year, and he said once that he regretted coining the phrase “technical debt.” He said it allowed people to think of the debt in a bottomless way: once you’ve accumulated some, why not a little more? After all, the first little bit didn’t hurt us, did it?

The end result of this thinking is the feature factory, where a company only ever builds new features, usually to attract new customers. Necessary refactors are called “tech debt” and left to pile up. Yes, this is just another view of bad management, but still, Ward thought that the metaphor afforded it too easily.

He said he wished instead that he’d coined “opportunity,” as in, producing or consuming it. Good practices produce opportunity. Opportunity can then be consumed in order to meet certain short-term goals.

So it flips the baseline. Rather than having a baseline of quality then dipping below it into tech debt, you’d produce opportunity to put you above the baseline. Once you have this opportunity, you consume it to get back to baseline but not below.

I’m not convinced that the concept phrased thus would have the same traction. Still, I love this way of looking at it, like I love much of Ward’s POV on the world.