This article is based on reporting originally published on TechTarget. Quotes are attributed to their original sources.
What Is Technical Debt?
Technical debt — sometimes called code debt — accumulates when low-quality or defective code is shipped, or when known defects are left unresolved. It is especially common in iterative development environments where release speed takes priority over code quality.
The analogy to financial debt is instructive. As Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop Technologies, explained: “You have to pay down that technical debt. Otherwise, a part of the application portfolio is a dead end, and it’s going to sink the company with overtime costs needed to do maintenance.” Left unaddressed, technical debt compounds — consuming engineering time, degrading product quality, and ultimately damaging customer satisfaction.
The following five strategies, drawn from practitioners and analysts in the Agile and DevOps space, offer actionable ways to reduce technical debt before it becomes unmanageable.
1. Define DevOps Best Practices — and Actually Follow Them
Automation is frequently cited as the cornerstone of DevOps, but tooling alone is not enough. Michael Irigoyen, a software engineer at Accusoft, speaking at DeveloperWeek 2017, emphasized the need to “automate the end-to-end process” — not just individual steps.
Matt Heusser, principal consultant for Excelon Development, observed that too many software organizations drop tools into their pipeline without first establishing solid foundational processes. When those tools fail to prevent defects, teams blame the tool rather than examining their underlying practices.
Christopher Tozzi, analyst for Fixate IO, noted that enforcing best practices prevents the process shortcuts that lead to poor code: “Doing things the quick-and-dirty way [can create] quick-and-dirty code snippets, which can add up to big technical debt across a large program.”
Practical steps that help enforce quality practices include:
- Facilitating structured collaboration between development and QA, such as the three amigos technique (developer, tester, and business analyst reviewing requirements together)
- Improving communication channels so defects surface earlier
- Establishing a component architecture that allows independent deployment of modules
- Scheduling regular hackathons or innovation time for teams to solve their own process problems
Accusoft’s experience with two-day hackathons illustrates the value of dedicated improvement time: those sessions produced internal tools including a log analyzer, a build-failure notification system, and a CSS reference site for UI developers.
2. Automate All Non-Value-Adding Work
Not all work that consumes engineering time contributes directly to the product. Compliance reporting, status updates, and manual handoffs between teams are necessary but don’t add product value. Kersten refers to these as “nonvalue work,” and argues they must be automated to keep pace with Agile iteration cadences.
The math is stark: “When you go from nine-month release cycles to four-week iterations, your people have to do the same nonvalue work that they would normally do every nine months in four weeks,” Kersten said. Automating handoffs, compliance checks, and reporting frees engineers to focus on building and improving the product, directly reducing the rate at which technical debt accumulates.
3. Don’t Let Defects Fester
The cost of fixing a defect rises sharply the longer it goes unaddressed. Theresa Lanowitz, founder of voke inc., put it plainly: “The later in software development that a defect is identified or found, the more expensive it is to resolve or remediate the issue.”
Research has consistently supported this view. A study by Barry Boehm and Victor Basili found that the cost of fixing bugs in production could be 1,000 times higher than fixing them during the requirements phase. A 2008 IBM Systems Sciences Institute report estimated that post-release defect resolution costs 30 times more than pre-release detection.
Beyond direct repair costs, deferred defects create operational overhead. As Heusser noted, the open defect list itself becomes a burden: “When a new bug is reported, people have to check the defect tracker to see if it was identified, but marked ‘fix-later.’ The open defect list begins to look big.” Each deferred fix adds noise, increases cognitive load on the team, and slows future development.
Bugs that reach production carry additional costs beyond repair time. Critical updates must be coordinated, users must be notified, and not all users will apply patches promptly — creating a fragmented user base running different software versions. Each of these scenarios damages the product’s reputation and erodes user trust.
4. Don’t Rush Through Requirements
A common misconception is that Agile’s iterative approach makes requirements gathering simpler. In practice, the opposite can be true. Lanowitz argued that poor requirements elicitation remains a primary cause of rework in Agile projects, just as it was in waterfall development.
“People think that developing stuff in smaller pieces now means there are fewer and more obvious requirements,” she said. But users are more demanding of individual feature releases precisely because they can evaluate and respond to them faster. A poorly specified feature released in a two-week sprint can generate significant rework — rework that constitutes technical debt.
Taking time to clarify requirements before a sprint begins — using techniques like the three amigos or behavior-driven development (BDD) — reduces the likelihood that completed work will need to be redone. Automated testing also plays a critical role in validating that delivered features actually meet their requirements.
5. Automate Testing Early and Comprehensively
Across all five strategies, automated testing is the most consistently cited lever for reducing technical debt. Without it, Agile and DevOps teams cannot maintain the pace of delivery that modern software demands while keeping quality high.
“Automate all the traditional types of tests,” Lanowitz advised. “It eliminates the overall total number of defects, reduces your test cycle and reduces your overall software cycle.”
Automation should span the full testing spectrum:
- Unit tests — validate individual functions or components in isolation
- Integration tests — verify that components interact correctly
- Regression tests — ensure new changes don’t break existing functionality
- End-to-end tests — simulate real user workflows across the full application stack
Kersten offered a competitive framing for teams that delay automation investment: “Those companies that don’t start automating now will get disrupted by the more lean startups.” Automated test suites are not merely a quality tool — they are a strategic asset that determines how quickly a team can safely ship.
Summary: A Practical Checklist
- ✅ Establish and enforce documented DevOps best practices — don’t rely on tools alone
- ✅ Automate compliance checks, reporting, and handoffs to free engineering capacity
- ✅ Fix defects as soon as they are identified — deferred fixes compound in cost
- ✅ Invest time in requirements clarity before each sprint, not after features are built
- ✅ Build comprehensive automated test coverage as a first-class deliverable, not an afterthought
Technical debt is unavoidable in any real-world software project, but its growth is controllable. Teams that treat quality, automation, and process discipline as continuous investments — not periodic cleanup tasks — consistently outperform those that allow debt to accumulate unchecked.