A simpler way to look at technical debt is to ignore all kinds of dubious notions of "quality" and "correctness" and focus on lines of code.
The more lines of code you have, the more stuff you have to maintain and understand.
Of course this is pretty stupid, but it's stupid in a way that sometimes leads to insight.
If your application consists of 1000 lines of code, you can rewrite it in an afternoon.
Also, cleverness can create its own kind of debt. Even as you believe you're working on reducing debt by creating some clever and sophisticated abstraction, you are actually just making it worse. I think this happens all the time.
That's why my basic, fundamental approach to software development is "throw it away and replace it with a simple shell script."
The more lines of code you have, the more stuff you have to maintain and understand.
Of course this is pretty stupid, but it's stupid in a way that sometimes leads to insight.
If your application consists of 1000 lines of code, you can rewrite it in an afternoon.
Also, cleverness can create its own kind of debt. Even as you believe you're working on reducing debt by creating some clever and sophisticated abstraction, you are actually just making it worse. I think this happens all the time.
That's why my basic, fundamental approach to software development is "throw it away and replace it with a simple shell script."