¿What is technical debt? Every Product Owner (PO) has experienced this scenario: At the beginning of the project, the development team was flying. They launched new features every week. The client was happy.

But six months later, something changed.

Now, asking for a simple change (like changing a button color or adding a field to a form) takes three days. Bugs appear out of nowhere. Developers look frustrated and repeat the phrase: “The code is spaghetti, we can’t touch that without breaking everything else.”

What happened?

What happened is that your project acquired Technical Debt. And just like a credit card that was maxed out and never paid off, now the “interest” is eating up your entire time budget.

At Koud, we believe that technical debt is not necessarily bad, as long as it is managed. The problem is not being in debt; the problem is not knowing you owe money.

What is Technical Debt? (The Mortgage Metaphor)

The term, coined by Ward Cunningham, uses a brilliant financial analogy.

Imagine you want to buy a house (launch an App).

You have two options:

1. Save all the money (Perfect Code): It takes you 10 years to gather the capital. When you buy the house, the market has already changed.
2. Take out a Mortgage (Technical Debt): You buy the house today and enjoy it now. But you commit to paying monthly interest for years.

In software development, taking a “shortcut” to launch a feature fast (hardcoding a variable, copy-pasting code instead of creating a reusable function) is like taking out a loan.

• The Benefit: You reach the market before your competition (Time-to-Market).
• The Interest: Every future minute your developers spend reading that confusing code or fixing the errors it causes is the interest you are paying.
• The Foreclosure: If you accumulate too much debt and never refactor, the system becomes unmanageable. Development stops completely. The bank forecloses on your house.

Symptoms: How to Know If Your Project Is “Blacklisted”?

Technical debt is invisible to end-users (until something breaks), but it is very visible to the team. Here are the clinical symptoms:

1. Decreasing Velocity: What used to take 1 day now takes 4.
2. Hydra Effect: You fix one bug here, and two bugs appear there. The code is fragile.
3. Painful Onboarding: A new programmer takes weeks to understand the code because it is illogical or lacks documentation.
4. Resistance to Change: Developers are afraid to touch certain parts of the system (“radioactive zone”) because no one knows how they work.

The Payment Strategy: Refactoring vs. Rewriting

When a client comes to Koud with a debt-ridden legacy system, the temptation is always: “We have to delete everything and start over from scratch.”

Warning! Rewriting from scratch is the most dangerous trap in software engineering (the famous Netscape mistake).

Our strategy to refactor legacy code is surgical:

1. Pay High Interest First: We identify the modules that are modified most frequently and have the most errors. We refactor only that.
2. Boy Scout Rule: “Leave the campground cleaner than you found it.” Every time a Koud developer touches a file to add a feature, they invest 10 extra minutes cleaning up that file’s code.
3. Maintenance Sprints: We negotiate with the Product Owner to dedicate 20% of each Sprint to paying technical debt. It’s the equivalent of setting aside part of your monthly income to pay off the credit card.

The Technical Debt Quadrant (Not All Debt Is Bad)

According to Martin Fowler’s famous technical debt metaphor, there are 4 types. It is vital to know which one you have:

• Reckless / Deliberate: “We don’t have time, do it quick and dirty.” (Dangerous).
• Reckless / Inadvertent: “We don’t know how to do it better.” (Lack of training).
• Prudent / Inadvertent: “Now that we finished, we realized how we should have done it.” (Natural learning).
• Prudent / Deliberate: “We know this isn’t perfect, but we need to launch to validate the market. We’ll fix it in Q2.” (Strategic).

At Koud, we encourage Prudent and Deliberate Debt. We consciously go into debt to gain speed, but we schedule the payment.

Checklist: Is Your Software Toxic?

• Do your developers frequently say “it’s faster to do it again than to fix it”?
• Do you lack automated tests (if you touch something, you don’t know if you broke something else)?
• Do you have libraries or frameworks with versions older than 3 years?
• Is project documentation non-existent or outdated?

Frequently Asked Questions

How much budget should I allocate to paying technical debt?

We recommend the 80/20 rule. Dedicate 80% of the time to new features (what the customer sees) and 20% to refactoring and architecture improvements (what keeps the business alive).

Can technical debt be completely eliminated?

No, and you shouldn’t try. Zero-debt software is probably software that took too long to release and cost too much. The goal is to keep debt at manageable levels, not zero.

How do I explain this to my CEO who only wants sales?

Speak their language: Risk and Opportunity Cost. “If we don’t invest in cleaning the code now, next quarter development will be 40% slower, and the risk of a critical system crash will increase by 50%.”

Conclusion

Ignoring technical debt is like ignoring a leak in the roof. At first, it’s just an annoyance, but eventually, the roof will collapse on your head.

Don’t let your code control you. At Koud, we help you negotiate that debt, restructure your “payments,” and recover the agility your business needs.