Risk Analysis

> Ward Cunningham: […] What I might have called technical debt is kind of at a personal level – commitment on the individual to do a good job – but as you move up in the Organization there becomes more responsibility. I compared the CFO to the CTO. We know that the CTO as a financial officer has financial responsibilities (everybody at that level has financial responsibilities) and they should be held accountable to stakeholders and so forth to be considering that. Whether that’s called technical debt or **Risk Analysis** or something like that, I think that technical debt is a new name for an old thing. Certainly at the CTO level that matters.

Ward proposed an incremental development strategy suitable for commercial software development in a competitive environment and explained it metaphorically as technical debt. This name stuck better than the strategy because condemning debt is much easier than exploiting it.