Understanding Technical Debt: What It Is and Why It Matters

Technical debt comes in different forms but can be grouped into five main categories: intentional, unintentional, documentation, infrastructure and environmental debt.

• Intentional Debt: Sometimes, companies intentionally create technical debt, knowing the risks and costs. This is called ‘planned debt.’ Reckless debt happens when teams rush and write messy code to meet deadlines. Prudent debt is small, manageable and affects parts of the code that rarely change.
• Unintentional Debt: This technical debt happens when teams use poor coding practices without realising it. This often occurs when companies hire inexperienced developers or skip proper testing and code reviews. As a result, issues including security risks, can go unnoticed for a long time.
• Documentation Debt: This debt happens when developers rush and don’t properly document their code. Over time, this becomes a problem, especially if someone leaves the company without explaining their work. Poor documentation was a major reason the Y2K issue became so costly to fix.
• Infrastructure Debt: It happens when software depends on specific systems like databases or file storage. If these dependencies aren’t documented and the company upgrades its infrastructure, the application might stop working, leading to unexpected issues and expensive solutions.
• Environmental Debt: It happens when teams don’t update software over time. For example, an old web app may stop working well as programming languages evolve. To fix this, developers must pause new work, update the code and ensure it stays compatible with the latest versions.