Technical debt may be a new concept but it is an old problem that increases business risk and cost to your company. Learn more about the types of technical debt, how to avoid them, and how to reduce the impact and cost to your organization.

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For companies trying to manage risk, knowing that the foundation of your business—your code—may have serious weaknesses should cause concern. The risks and costs are many beginning with the very real possibility that the next change to a program could cause an outage. Most businesses have a good idea of how much an hour of downtime costs them in lost revenue, but with the increasing ‘need for speed’ in an always-on world, lost customers could multiply the impact of an outage. Allied to this is the fact that fixing a problem in complex, poorly understood code can be much more time-consuming, lengthening the duration of the outage.

Many companies don’t realize that their code is essentially undocumented until a major outage occurs. With constant employee turnover, both through employee choice and layoffs, new people are encountering applications that have been touched by many people at different skill levels. This means that even regular maintenance, whether to add new features, to fix issues or to apply compliance features, will be slower, more difficult and more error-prone. When attempting to interconnect applications to build a new capability, those interconnections can be problematic as well. The more technical debt, the more of a black box the application has become. And what you don’t know about your code can hurt you and your business.