Technical Debt: Not Good!

Technical debt happens when the solution (i.e. a website, app, etc) was done in such a way that the code is not easily maintainable, fragile, and difficult for programmers to make changes to. 

Why this is bad:

  1. It slows down innovation. More time is spent maintaining code and fixing bugs rather than actually evolving the thing that was built in the first place.
  2. It often indicates poor choices made at the outset. It sometimes means that poor architecture choices were made in the first place. I.e. you built a website on a platform that was destined to be obsolete 3 years from now, or in a programming language that only a few programmers know and is declining in popularity. 
  3. It costs a lot of money just to keep it running. Keeping the website or app bug-free, reliable, and secure can entail a lot of cost if it was not built right from the get go or has acquired a lot of poorly-organized code and features over time. 
  4. The architecture and user interface can suffer. Technical debt isn't only under the surface – it can show itself in an ever-growing menu that is hard for users to navigate, in page content types that don't serve the purpose of the marketing team, and in designs and layouts that just don't let the organization tell its story in the best possible way.