Technical Debt (and Technical Debt Decision Making) are a good take on using the concept of technical debt to ensure that your stakeholders understand why you must spend time fixing their system even though it may seem to be working perfectly fine right now. (An example of incurring technical debt is using SQLite when you know that in the long term the system needs to store its data in Postgres or Oracle.)
(The author of these essays, Steve McConnell, and his team at Construx really know their stuff -- if you have chance to take one of their classes, grab it.)
