Your Code as a Crime Scene, Second Edition, 2nd Edition

Know the Costs and Consequences of Technical Debt

In the late 2010s, we finally got research numbers on the impact of technical debt. The numbers vary depending on which study you read. They all paint a pretty depressing picture: organizations waste 23 to 42 percent of developers’ time dealing with the consequences of technical debt and bad code in general (Software developer productivity loss due to technical debt [BMB19]).

As a thought experiment, let’s consider what 42 percent waste implies. Say we have a department with 100 software engineers. If we waste 42 percent of their time, all else being equal, we end up with an output corresponding to just 58 developers, an efficiency loss that would be unacceptable in virtually any other context ...