As someone who struggles with contrived metaphors for everything, I think this is a pretty excellent one :)
Although I'm not sure dishes are the best. You're not really going to make it a day without cleaning the dishes.
Deep cleans are a good metaphor, but maybe also just general maintenance of kitchen equipment? E.g. having a stove where half the burners don't work half the time, an oven with wildly variable temperature, duller and duller knives, etc. seem much more akin to technical debt as they make it continually harder to produce quality results and work efficiently. However, you can ignore them for quite a long time, and you don't need to pay attention to problems every single day. (It's fine to lose an oven for a while, but you'd better fix it quickly.)
The Capability Trap. The core idea is that you have pressure to deliver a product (get "real" work done), but also maintain or improve your ability to do the work. If you ignore that maintenance portion, you end up being able to produce less over time. And the cost to recover the capability increases over time due to neglect.
In the kitchen example, cleaning and maintaining the fryers every (period of time) means that you can get years, if not decades, out of them. But failing to do so may force you to turn them off (produce less food for customers at a time). Then you have to either replace or pay for expensive maintenance and repair work, which is usually more costly than just having someone come in and drain the system, clean it, and give it a once over every (period of time).
EDIT:
I thought that paper had been submitted and commented on more recently, but the last commented submission was from January 2015. So it's now submitted here:
> The Capability Trap. The core idea is that you have pressure to deliver a product (get "real" work done), but also maintain or improve your ability to do the work.
This nudged a decade-old memory of how non-profits (and to an extent, the public sector) find it much easier to get funding for specific outcomes, but incredibly hard to get funding for what they usually call "capacity building". The medium-term solution seems to be outsourcing to a vendor that can both deliver an outcome and amortize capacity building across many customers in your sector, but over the long term this leads to a form of organizational learned helplessness, and vendors that eventually switch to rent-extraction rather than delivering outcomes or building capacity (or rather, the capacity they are still building is largely the ability to secure contracts).
Ironically, the longer the vendor takes to switch to a rent-extraction strategy (and the more slowly they boil the frog), the more entrenched they become as a defacto standard, and the harder it becomes to eventually displace them (for a competitor) or replace them (for a customer) as a vendor.
> You're not really going to make it a day without cleaning the dishes.
I always do a review right before I'm ready to commit my code, to see if there are any obvious refactorings, need for comments, or style issues to be addressed.
I find this constant tidying up, like cleaning the dishes after every meal, prevents having to do a massive clean up at the worst possible time down the line.
Deep cleans seem to corner the experience too much.
To the article's institutional knowledge idea, specialties, allergies, or chemical compatibilities might be a good catch all.
The more features you add with more customers and developers from different teams, the harder it is to guarantee any dish won't affect nut allergies. Mixing orange juice and milk WILL happen, and you'll only find out about it when the wrong customer experiences it.
Although I'm not sure dishes are the best. You're not really going to make it a day without cleaning the dishes.
Deep cleans are a good metaphor, but maybe also just general maintenance of kitchen equipment? E.g. having a stove where half the burners don't work half the time, an oven with wildly variable temperature, duller and duller knives, etc. seem much more akin to technical debt as they make it continually harder to produce quality results and work efficiently. However, you can ignore them for quite a long time, and you don't need to pay attention to problems every single day. (It's fine to lose an oven for a while, but you'd better fix it quickly.)