That's the thing though! Quality :tm: is very hard to account for, especially when the quality is in the system, tooling, and process to build the quality end product.

And often times technical debt isn't actually something you can put on the balance sheet or bug tracker. It's all the little investments in the future that are deferred or skipped. That one code change is so minor you can phone in the review, you'll write better documentation for that new feature in a few weeks when you have some time, etc.