The Real Cost of Technical Debt

Post 6 of a Series: Tackling Technical Debt Redux: a Deeper Dive As we’ve mentioned throughout this series, some technical debt is unavoidable. Creating a perfectly elegant and complete solution without missing business deadlines and objectives is impossible. However, moving fast doesn’t mean companies should throw caution to the wind and ignore the growing backlog of technical debt. This is post 6; get the rest of the picture by starting with Part 1.

Let’s look more deeply at how unmanaged technical debt can affect your bottom line and your teams’ productivity and morale.

Increased Maintenance Costs

As technical debt piles up, codebases become unwieldy to work with. 43% of leaders surveyed in Onymos’ 2023 Application Development Survey (PDF download) report that their teams spend 40% or more of their time on maintenance. A simple change may take hours to understand and untangle previous code decisions. The time and efforts to fix bugs or security vulnerabilities also increase, leading to added risk that can destroy customer trust in your products and support. According to one estimate, the average cost of fixing vulnerabilities is an alarming $700,000 per year for a team of 100 developers. The longer it takes to trace vulnerabilities to specific code, understand dependencies, and rewrite poorly written code, the higher the costs.

Decreased Productivity

A study from ScienceDirect reports that developers waste an average of 23% of their time on technical debt. That’s equivalent to one day of every working week! An organization may have unmanaged technical debt due to poor enforcement of coding standards, legacy systems, or lack of knowledge transfer as senior developers leave. All of these challenges make it difficult to onboard new developers quickly, and the current team needs to spend more individual time helping new hires understand the code, tools, and processes. Even for experienced developers, older, poorly written code can hinder their ability to add new features efficiently. Before they can confidently introduce new contributions, they often need to spend time correcting the existing bad code to ensure that their updates don’t introduce new bugs.

Fragility, Scalability Challenges, and System Risks

As technical debt grows, the quality of the codebase declines. This deterioration results in a system that becomes more fragile, harder to comprehend, and increasingly error-prone, making it more challenging to implement new features or make necessary changes. The system’s fragility also hampers its ability to scale effectively to meet new demands, leading to performance issues, higher infrastructure costs, and potentially requiring significant refactoring or even a complete system overhaul. Moreover, this fragility increases the risk of system failures or critical bugs in production, which can cause downtime, harm customer satisfaction, and damage the company’s reputation.

Poor Morale and Culture

Bright developers, excited about designing and coding innovative features, can quickly lose enthusiasm as they hit roadblock after roadblock. The distraction and frustration of constantly having to unravel and fix previous technical debt decisions can erode team morale over time. If teams are under pressure to ship and are not given enough time to address technical debt before it becomes a burden, resentment and finger-pointing can become part of the team’s culture as productivity slows to a crawl.

Summary

Technical managers and leaders should assess their current technical debt loads, prevent unnecessary technical debt from accruing, and work with their teams on how best to reduce outstanding tech debt. While some tech debt will undoubtedly be necessary in the short term, ignoring it can increase the costs of delivering future features, hamper scalability, and harm morale.