Extreme Programmers (XP-ers) like to use metaphors or analogies for the systems they are working on so that they can communicate with their non-technical customers, fostering better collaboration and co-creation. When Ward Cunningham coined the term technical debt, he was working on a financial project. He wanted to communicate to his manager why the first-cut of the software would incur an amount of rework. The metaphor Ward created was in intended to show that for any software product we develop, we increase our understanding of how it will really work as it moves through the development lifecycle. Knowing that we don’t know everything up front and that we’re not going…