When your development team opts for a quick solution to meet immediate project requirements, they may choose to prioritize expediency over elegance, efficiency, or rigorous testing. Sometimes, this trade-off becomes necessary to outpace competitors or fulfill customer demands promptly.
Nonetheless, these decisions accumulate over time, leading to the accrual of technical debt. In the future, your team will need to address these deficiencies through refactoring, bug fixes, or reworking certain aspects of the system.
If left unaddressed, technical debt can gradually become overwhelming, potentially impeding future development efforts. The longer you postpone the resolution of technical debt, the more challenging it becomes to rectify. Essentially, you end up constructing your entire infrastructure on an unstable foundation, a situation that inevitably leads to a potential collapse.
In this article, we will guide you through comprehensive strategies for effectively managing technical debt and reducing it whenever feasible.
What is technical debt?
Technical debt refers to the gathering of suboptimal or hasty solutions in software development, which can impede future advancements and inflate expenses. It embodies the additional workload in development that emerges when a team opts for a swift and straightforward solution in the present instead of adopting a superior but more time-consuming approach.
Similar to financial debt, technical debt also accrues costs over time:
- Software patches
- Increased maintenance requirements
- Restructuring
- Bug fixes
- Lengthy development processes

Origins of Technical Debt
First coined in the 1990s by Ward Cunningham in the Agile Manifesto, technical debt originally referred to software coding. “Shipping first-time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with refactoring,” Cunningham said in 1992. “The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on code that is not quite right for the programming task of the moment counts as interest on that debt.”
Related: Technical Debt: A Data Center Security Risk You Can’t Afford
Since then, the concept of technical debt has been applied to a variety of operations, including data centers. Every organization has some degree of technical debt, but it’s best to keep debt low so personnel can focus on new initiatives as opposed to applying endless maintenance to outdated systems.
How Do You Identify Tech Debt?
It can be challenging to identify technical debt because the causes are myriad. In order to ascertain what type of technical debt there is and how to fix it, you should:
- Talk to on-campus workers about possible inefficiencies. Individuals involved in the day-to-day operations will be aware of issues and can advise on how to fix them.
- Take an inventory of equipment, assess the lifespan, and determine if it is operating efficiently.
- Analyze data to identify potential power waste and opportunities to automize inefficient manual processes.

What are the causes of technical debt?
- Unclear Project Requirements: Changing or unclear project requirements can lead to technical debt as development teams may need to revisit and modify code to accommodate new or revised specifications.
- Poor Code Quality: Code that does not adhere to established coding standards can become a source of technical debt. Non-modular or overly complex code can be challenging to maintain and integrate with other parts of the system.
- Lack of Developer Training: Insufficient training and skills among developers can result in poorly written code, increasing the likelihood of technical debt.
- Inefficient Tool Implementation: Incorporating unnecessary or poorly justified tools or technologies can waste resources and create technical debt.
- Insufficient Documentation: Incomplete or inaccurate code documentation can make it difficult for developers to understand and work on existing code, contributing to technical debt.
- Hardware Implementation Issues: Poorly labeled or configured hardware can lead to technical debt by making maintenance and troubleshooting more complex. Ignoring hardware configurations can also result in future performance or security problems.
- Lack of Testing: Releasing code without thorough testing can lead to performance issues and bugs that require subsequent fixes, adding to technical debt.
- Information Silos: Isolated teams or departments that do not communicate effectively can create duplicative efforts and misunderstandings, leading to technical debt.
- Pressure from Competing Departments: When development teams face pressure to prioritize immediate business needs over long-term code quality, they may make decisions that result in technical debt.
- Neglecting Updates: Failing to update or maintain legacy code and systems while implementing new ones can lead to compatibility and interoperability issues, contributing to technical debt.
Is technical debt bad?
Similar to financial debt, technical debt can serve different purposes in software development, and its impact can vary based on how it is incurred:
- Intentional Technical Debt: In some cases, technical debt is incurred strategically, with full awareness of the trade-offs involved. Development teams may choose to accumulate technical debt to meet tight project deadlines or deliver essential features to users quickly. This can be a calculated decision to gain a competitive advantage or meet market demands, with the intention of addressing the debt later through refactoring or improvements.
- Unintentional Technical Debt: On the other hand, technical debt can also result from unintentional mistakes made during the software development process. These mistakes might include rushed coding, inadequate testing, or poor decision-making due to limited resources or time constraints. Such unintentional debt can accumulate without a clear plan for repayment, potentially causing long-term problems if not addressed.
In both cases, it’s crucial for development teams to maintain awareness of the technical debt they are accumulating. Managing technical debt effectively involves a balance between meeting short-term goals and ensuring long-term software maintainability and quality. A well-thought-out strategy for addressing technical debt over time can help prevent it from becoming overwhelming and hindering future development efforts.
How can tech debt impact your business?
Applications of behavioral analytics include:
- Dissatisfied users: Tech debt generally results in buggy code, which in turn results in poor user experience and lack of satisfaction. This ultimately translates to increased expenses (due to an increased need for customer service) and lower revenues (due to customer defections).
- Longer development cycles: As tech debt worsens, it becomes harder for developers to work within the existing code base, splitting time between developing new features and correcting old ones, which slows the build process and delays time to market.
- Limited innovation: When tech debt is severe, developers need to continue servicing the issues instead of devoting time to building innovative new features.
- Potential security problems: Poorly written code is often poorly secured, which can introduce unexpected vulnerabilities to enterprise software systems.
What are the financial effects of tech debt?
Tech debt can also have numerous negative financial effects on the business in the following ways:
- Direct loss of sales: Customers unhappy with buggy software are likely to cease being customers.
- Increased support costs: Customers who remain will require more attention, often with customer support.
- Increased developer headcount: Managing tech debt requires additional human capital to remediate debt-laden software.
- Lower productivity: Developers are unable to devote as much time to developing value-added software features, lowering overall productivity and impeding business goals and business needs.
- Increased risk of a security breach: Security breaches are laden with financial risk, including direct loss of assets, loss of business, and the risk of regulatory fines and penalties.