Bad Code Isn’t Technical Debt, It’s an Unhedged Call Option
Steve Freeman (via Dave DeLong):
Call options are a better model than debt for cruddy code (without tests) because they capture the unpredictability of what we do. If I slap in an a feature without cleaning up then I get the benefit immediately, I collect the premium. If I never see that code again, then I’m ahead and, in retrospect, it would have been foolish to have spent time cleaning it up.
On the other hand, if a radical new feature comes in that I have to do, all those quick fixes suddenly become very expensive to work with.
