The Real Cost of Technical Debt
Technical debt isn't just about code quality. It's about the decisions you can't make because of the decisions you made before.
Crimson Owl Technologies |
The phrase “technical debt” gets used carelessly. It’s become shorthand for “code I don’t like” or “things we should fix someday.”
That dilution is dangerous, because real technical debt has real costs—and they’re not what most people think.
What Technical Debt Actually Is
Ward Cunningham, who coined the term, was precise about what he meant: technical debt is the gap between what you know now and what the code reflects.
When you ship code that doesn’t fully embody your current understanding of the problem, you’ve taken on debt. That’s not always wrong—sometimes shipping faster matters more than getting everything right. But like financial debt, it accrues interest.
Where the Costs Hide
The obvious cost of technical debt is the time spent working around it. Code that’s hard to modify stays hard to modify. Each change takes longer than it should.
But the real costs are more subtle:
Lost optionality. Technical debt constrains future choices. A tightly coupled system can’t easily adopt new technologies. A rigid data model can’t accommodate new business requirements. You find yourself saying “we’d like to, but we can’t.”
Increased risk. Systems with significant technical debt are harder to reason about. Changes have unexpected consequences. Deployments become stressful events rather than routine operations.
Slower hiring. Engineers can tell when they’re looking at a codebase with significant debt. The best ones will factor that into their decision to join—or not.
Hidden dependencies. Debt often hides in the connections between systems. That integration you built quickly years ago? It’s now load-bearing infrastructure that nobody fully understands.
Measuring What Matters
Most metrics for technical debt focus on code quality—complexity scores, test coverage, linting violations. Those have value, but they miss the bigger picture.
Better questions:
- How long does it take to make a typical change?
- How often do deployments cause incidents?
- How many workarounds exist in the codebase?
- What features have we declined to build because of technical constraints?
The last question is particularly revealing. If you’re regularly saying no to business opportunities because of technical limitations, your debt has become a strategic liability.
Paying It Down
The good news: technical debt can be managed. The key is treating it as a continuous practice, not a one-time cleanup.
Make it visible. Track debt explicitly. Document what the ideal state would be, and why the current state differs.
Pay incrementally. Every change is an opportunity to improve the area you’re touching. Not rewriting—just leaving things slightly better than you found them.
Prevent new debt. Not all debt is avoidable, but much of it is. Code reviews, architecture discussions, and clear standards prevent debt from accumulating unconsciously.
Allocate capacity. Some debt requires dedicated effort to address. Build that into your planning. Twenty percent of engineering time spent on debt reduction is not excessive—it’s sustainable.
Understanding your technical debt is the first step to managing it. Our architecture reviews help teams identify where debt has accumulated and build realistic plans to address it.