foohoo_blue

"If it is ‘debt’ you actually plan to pay it."

Exactly that, and it should be a decision to accrue it.

My opinion is that 'not thinking or understanding' the work shouldn't be labelled as technical debt. Technical debt should be a conscious decision about an implementation that needs to be revisited in the future, either for scalability, readability, extendibility etc concerns. Also, in that vein, not writing unit tests should not be considered technical debt, that is part of any implementation and should be factored into any completed work.

The lack of understanding or thinking that might lead to people re-visit code should be viewed almost as a defect, along with not having test coverage.

Therefore the term debt, I think, is a good analogy, because there is a conscious decision to accrue it. It should be reported regularly and monitored with the original decision behind it.