There no such thing as "good" technical debt

TL;DR; Technical debt is always harmful and should not be considered acceptable; it slows onboarding, increases errors, and creates inefficiency. It accumulates quickly and can suddenly halt delivery, as seen in Microsoft’s experience before they overhauled their processes and addressed their debt. Development managers should prioritize identifying and reducing technical debt now rather than accepting it as normal.

Published on 19 April 2025

Written by Martin Hinshelwood

1 minute read

https://nkdagility.com/resources/lLNjkL_zGQa

Let’s put this to rest: there’s no such thing as “good” technical debt.

If new engineers take weeks to become productive, your system is unreadable. If every change introduces faults, your architecture is fragile. If you’re manually handling tasks that should be automated, you’re building inefficiency into your process.

And here’s the kicker, technical debt doesn’t accumulate linearly. It builds up silently, then one day, it collapses your ability to deliver.

Microsoft learned this the hard way with TFS. They were shipping 24 features per year across a team of 600 engineers. The solution? A complete overhaul in how they worked. They moved to 3-week Sprints, embraced transparency, and started paying back their technical debt.

Stop normalising dysfunction. There’s no “acceptable level” of technical debt, only risk you haven’t accounted for yet.

What’s stopping your team from tackling technical debt head-on?

Also published on: LinkedIn

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