Technical debt is the situation where a business uses technology that is, for whatever the reason, out of date, obsolete, ill-suited, problematic to maintain, difficult to scale to your needs or adapt to new situations the business requires.

Technical debt is the difference between what you really need longer term and what you have. It can also be the difference between what you have and what’s currently mainstream in the marketplace.

Granted, there are many different types of technology that a company can use.  I am limiting my scope for this article to technology debt related to the information technology area within a business.

How does technical debt grow?

Technical debt builds up anytime the pain or cost of a needed change is perceived to be greater than the pain of ongoing use of the existing technology already in the business. In other words, it can, in some cases, provide a short term gain. But this almost always comes at a long term expense, thus technical debt. This debt growth can happen in many ways.

For example, several new security updates are released for your system but you find yourself saying “we will install that update next quarter, we are too busy with …”

Or what if a critical portion of software in a key application has become so unwieldy to update that you are breaking the nightly build and test on a regular basis and you find yourself thinking “we can refactor that code in the next release because we don’t have time now“?

What about that 5 year old server that is running the accounting software that has been end-of-lifed by the vendor but you think “we are short on budget the rest of the year so we will put that server in the plan for next year, its running fine now“?

And on and on it goes.

Multiply this over several systems and you can see how this compounds quickly.

The changes are put off and the technical debt grows. The technical pace of change, especially in the IT and software world is rapid. If your team or business is strapped for resources it can be hard to meet the more urgent demands of the business  and have any margin left to deal with the issues of technical debt.

How is technical debt growing in your business?