> Ward Cunningham: So I would say that the curse of success is that you have to keep working on the program and often you have to keep working on the program adding features that were unanticipated at the project inception, and that’s what we consider **Success**. Let me sharpen that a little bit. Let’s say when we’re adding those features that it’s still a sound economic proposition – the cost of adding the new features doesn’t escalate because the program has somehow not turned into an architectural mess and that’s what we’re trying to avoid. I would say when the time is right we can take what we’ve learned so far and fold that back into the program to keep the program healthy and fit throughout its lifetime. And we want these programs to be successful and we want them to grow so that we don’t have to throw them away prematurely and start over from scratch, and repeat all the same mistakes again.
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.