@pierstoval @anthonywilliams I don't think that this captures that it is more about making future modifications more difficult rather than a direct problem. A hole in a roof is a bug. Technical debt isn't a bug, but it can make avoiding bugs more costly.

I think a better ELI5 would be "technical debt is like buying cheap scissors. They're cheaper, and they might *work*, but they're going to make building your next arts and crafts project more difficult"

@malwareminigun
@pierstoval

True. Originally Technical Debt was about making a choice to do something cheaper/less well now for some benefit (e.g. time to market), and defer the cost of that until later.

These days it is often used to mean something that is less than ideal about the current codebase, so a leaky roof could be a more reasonable analogy.

I like the cheap scissors idea though

@anthonywilliams @pierstoval A leaky roof is a suboptimal thing but it's also customer facing, and technical debt isn't.

How about something like a fleet of unreliable delivery vans. The folks doing the deliveries are going to have to move things around more to transfer into working ones when something breaks but the packages can still get delivered on time.