How much technical debt do you have?

Technical debt is the future cost created by technical decisions that make a system harder to change, maintain or operate. Some technical debt is deliberate and reasonable. The problem begins when it accumulates faster than the team can understand and manage it.

Technical debt can come from rushed implementations, changing requirements, outdated dependencies, weak testing, architectural shortcuts, missing documentation or systems that have simply grown beyond their original design.

Technical debt becomes a business problem when it starts affecting delivery speed, reliability, security, hiring or the ability to make changes confidently. A system does not need to be perfectly clean to be healthy. The important question is whether the debt is understood and whether it is slowing the company down.

No. Some technical debt is worth keeping because the cost of removing it is higher than the benefit. The goal is to identify the debt that creates meaningful business risk and prioritize that work rather than turning technical cleanup into an endless project.