You might be thinking I don’t have any technical debt. Oh yeah? see if any of the signs below apply to you.

Signs of technical debt

Your corporate PC’s are running Windows XP.

You or your employees are still running Internet Explorer.

You are hosting a web site on an ancient version of WordPress.

You are updating your web pages with Front Page.

Your office computers use Office 2003.

You keep clicking “Remind me later” to the prompt to install your software updates.

If your software development team dreads touching one of your legacy products for fear that fixing one bug is introducing others, then you have technical debt.

Is the key web site app you use is based on a framework that stopped being developed and maintained 7 years ago?

Do you maintain systems that use libraries or other tools that were discontinued long ago?

Are you still making use of that open source project that the maintainer closed down 5 years ago?

Do you have unapplied patches, security updates, or  incomplete backups?

What about the server that has been running for 5 years you have been meaning to upgrade? Somehow you can’t seem to find the time to schedule the downtime and migration of the systems that is serves.

Are you still running the Snow Leopard on your MacBook?

Yep, all of these examples are technical debt.

But wait, there’s more.

What about your procedure and processes regarding your IT systems?

Is your documentation behind?

Business continuity plans and disaster recovery?

Customer data protection?

That too is all technical debt.

Does your website still say “Best if viewed with Netscape”? Oh man thats technical debt.

There are so many more.

No business not matter how large or small is immune from the problem of technical debt.

Step 1 of any 12 step program is admitting you have a problem  and if you have these signs in your business then you are a victim of technical debt. Maybe is it not causing you great pain now. But at some point it will.

The question is what do you do about it?