What is technical debt?
Imagine you’re renovating an old house. You decide to cut corners on some repairs to save time and money. Instead of replacing the aging plumbing, you patch it up. Instead of rewiring outdated electrical systems, you add a few adapters and extensions. Everything seems fine—until one day, a leak floods your basement, or a short circuit sparks a fire. Now, the cost and effort to fix everything have skyrocketed.
This is exactly how technical debt works in software development. In the rush to deliver features, teams often take shortcuts that seem harmless at the time but accumulate over time, leading to catastrophic failures.
This article explores the various aspects of technical debt across software engineering, including development, architecture, and DevOps and how to navigate through those challenges.
Types of Technical Debt
Technical debt is a phrase originally coined by Ward Cunningham who described it as:
“With borrowed money, you can do something sooner than you might otherwise, but then until you pay back that money you’ll be paying interest. I thought borrowing money was a good idea, I thought that rushing software out the door to get some experience with it was a good idea, but that of course, you would eventually go back and as you learned things about that software you would repay that loan by refactoring the program to reflect your experience as you acquired it.”
I think technical debt can be divided into 4 major categories:
Why and how to acquire technical debt deliberately?
Technical debt is not always a bad thing. When approached strategically, it can be leveraged to accelerate development while keeping scalability in mind. The key is to make intentional trade-offs rather than allowing debt to accumulate haphazardly.
Continuing the analogy of building a house: If you’re on a tight budget or deadline, you might choose to install a simple wooden staircase instead of a custom steel one. This allows the house to be functional and move-in ready while keeping future upgrades possible. However, if you don’t account for the load-bearing capacity of the floor, leave space for wider steps, or plan anchor points for a heavier structure, replacing it later will be costly and disruptive.
Similarly, in software development, teams must make conscious decisions about which aspects to optimize for speed and which require long-term resilience. At Kapstan, we prioritize rapid experimentation to test new ideas and validate real use cases. Instead of over-engineering every possible edge case, we build an MVP with an extensible architecture, ensuring that when the product evolves, we can scale efficiently without requiring a complete overhaul. The key is to understand the debt you are incurring, document it, and have a clear roadmap for addressing it when business priorities demand it.
The impact of Technical Debt
Delaying too long can turn minor issues into major bottlenecks. It’s like having a house with a small crack in the foundation—easy to ignore at first, but over time, that crack spreads, and suddenly, the entire structure is at risk. Proactive maintenance is far cheaper than large-scale refactoring.
In my past life, I experienced a situation where the code had a feature flag that had been left untouched for over eight years. When the time came to introduce a new workflow around that, what should have been a quick integration turned into an agonizing two-week deep dive. The untested, outdated feature flag had sprawled into multiple dependencies, requiring detective work just to understand what was happening before we could even begin modifying it. The experience was a stark reminder that neglected technical debt isn’t just an inconvenience—it’s a productivity sinkhole waiting to trap you at the worst possible moment.
How to managing Technical Debt effectively?
Managing technical debt is no rocket science. All it requires is identifying, keeping track and planning around it.
Acknowledge it, track It and plan for it:
I am a firm believer of “What gets measured, gets improved”.
You need to have some ticketing system to manage all your software development activities. There has to be a central place where you can see all the tasks that you need to plan for. A tech debt item sitting in my personal to-do list instead of a common team ticket tracking system is as good as forgotten.
- When acquiring technical debt deliberately, ensure you that you file a task for it.
Tagging: Usually deliberate tech debts are handled in the next iteration of the project - so tag it with the appropriate feature project. - When discovering some tech debt via a product alert or customer ticket, you may patch things in the moment to get a handle on the situation. In my experience, what has worked well in such situations is what we call an “Issue postmortem”. Once the situation is handled in time, we should look at the problem in depth and figure out what needs to be done for us to avoid it in future. These kinds of issues usually fall under process or accidental technical debt.
You can use the following template to do a thorough postmortem:- Brief description of the issue and it’s impact on the end customer.
- How to replicate the issue?
- Root cause analysis
- What was done to fix the issue during the outage?
- Prepare a list of action items to avoid having the issue in future.
- Prepare a list of any necessary clean-up that may be required after a proper fix is in place (it could have things like removing the patchy code, or running a database migration)
- Prepare a list of items that can be incorporated in the process/automation to help avoid this issue in future.
- Once you have this document filled out, ensure you file relevant tickets and tag them:
- I like to use a label called “outage-action-item” for urgent tasks and ensure that the count of these tickets remains low.
- You must tag important tasks as well with a different label, which should be picked from time to time during sprint planning. I use a label called “tech-debt” for such tasks.
- Another handy label is “cleanup” for any clean up of database, patchy code or feature flags.
- You may acquire tech debt because of aging - that is a certain technology choice may have worked well in the past, however, as your product expanded, this tech doesn’t support you well anymore, or a newer version/solution is available in the market. These are usually larger investments (several weeks) and must be strategically planned.
At Kapstan, we used NATS for our disjoint system design needs, but as the product grew, managing workflows became complex. Changes to certain parts of the system led to more defects, and message sprawl made processing harder. Missed messages would sometimes cause workflows to stall. To address this, we switched to Temporal—the right tool for the job. The migration took several weeks since it was core to our product and needed thorough testing.
Refactoring
There is a common saying: Always leave the code cleaner than you found it. This should be a guiding principle—whenever you work on a piece of code, if it was difficult to understand or can be improved, take the time to enhance it.
However, it’s important to avoid falling into the trap of excessive refactoring. If you find yourself constantly revisiting the same code, it could be a sign of over-engineering. A good rule of thumb: Don’t write any code today that you know you will have to revisit in a month’s time. If refactoring becomes a frequent necessity, it may indicate deeper architectural issues.
Sometimes, larger refactors are unavoidable. A good indicator is when feature development in a particular area takes significantly longer than expected, a workflow becomes increasingly buggy, or engineers actively avoid working on a specific section of code. These are signs that a well-planned refactor is needed and should be accounted for in sprint planning.
Automated Testing & CI/CD
- Before undertaking any refactor, it is critical to ensure automation coverage—either by verifying existing test suites or adding new ones. Without proper test automation, refactoring can inadvertently introduce regressions and further increase technical debt instead of reducing it.
- Use continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) to prevent compounding issues over time.
Strong engineering cultural & best practices
Just as constructing a house requires a well-planned blueprint, building scalable software demands thoughtful planning. Without it, you may need to tear down walls just to fix fundamental issues. Imagine designing a home without considering future expansions—eventually, even small improvements could become costly and complex.
At Kapstan, we emphasize structured planning—starting with a Product Requirements Document (PRD) to clarify requirements. Equally important is a solid architectural blueprint that undergoes review, ensuring we don’t miss crucial elements that could lead to costly rework later.
Another key principle is avoiding duplication. Repeated code signals the need for a reusable component or library. Just like standardized building materials enhance efficiency in construction, well-structured reusable components improve maintainability and reduce complexity in software.
Decision Framework: When to pay down vs. when to live with it
Just as you wouldn't build another floor on top of a weak foundation, ignoring debt in software will eventually cause everything to collapse. At the same time, not all technical debt is urgent—some improvements, like repainting walls in a house, can be deferred without significant risk.
Assess the cost of fixing versus the risk of leaving the debt in place. Use a risk-based approach: Address technical debt that affects scalability, security, or long-term maintainability first.
Leaders often face trade-offs between delivering new features quickly and maintaining long-term stability. The consensus among successful teams:
- Choose your battles: Not all debt needs to be repaid immediately.
- Invest in automation early: The longer you wait, the harder it becomes.
- Make technical debt visible: Treat it like product debt and communicate its impact to stakeholders.
A common saying in project management is that you can optimize for time, content, or quality—but only two at a time assuming technology and team competency remain constant. When resources are constrained, technical debt often competes against business priorities, requiring a fine balance.
Make use of the advancements in technology and incorporate the right processes and tools. With all this, you may be able to control 2.5 if not all 3 variables.
Technical Debt; Key Takeaways
Technical debt is inevitable but manageable. Tracking, prioritizing, and repaying it strategically is essential. Continuous improvement is key—systems must evolve alongside business needs.
Avoiding the lure of shiny new tools is equally important. Just because a tool is new doesn’t mean it is necessary. Tool proliferation is a real problem—introducing too many tools without proper evaluation often creates complexity rather than solving problems. Engineers must focus on solutions that integrate well rather than adding yet another layer of complexity to an already burdened system.
Lastly, automation remains one of the strongest allies against technical debt. The more repeatable tasks that can be automated, the less debt will accumulate over time.
The ideal state in my books is:
- Code automatically moves through CI/CD pipelines, with minimal manual intervention. This allows for agility to fix issues when they are discovered. You can focus on the issue at hand rather than dealing with infrastructural and process debt with proper systems in place.
- Monitoring is fully integrated across security, functionality, and cost. Pro-active monitoring will help anticipate issues before they become an outage.
- Self-healing systems resolve known issues automatically. With the advancement in technology and available mature platforms, your team can meaningfully offload.
At Kapstan, we believe in building software that enables teams to focus on delivering business value while minimizing tooling and operational technical debt. Kapstan provides fully integrated CI/CD pipelines, cost optimization, security, and out-of-the-box logging and metrics—all in a single platform helping avoid tool proliferation. This ensures that teams can ship faster, detect and resolve issues proactively, and optimize costs without adding complexity.
To learn more, visit kapstan.io or explore our documentation at docs.kapstan.io.
I leave you with one final thought: Managing technical debt is a balance of people, processes, and tools. While AI and automation will continue to push boundaries, the fundamentals of collaboration and mindful decision-making remain timeless.
