Causes of technical debt

Before we discuss how to tackle technical debt, let's first examine some of its most common causes:

• Lack of talent: Inexperienced developers may not follow best practices and write unclean code.
• Lack of time: Setting unreasonable deadlines, or adding new features without allotting additional time, means developers do not have enough time to follow proper processes of writing tests, conducting code reviews, and so on.
• Lack of morale: We should not overlook the human aspect of development. If requirements change all the time, or developers are required to work overtime, then they're not likely to produce good work.

All of these causes can easily be mitigated. The problem of inexperienced developers can be tackled through mentoring, code reviews, and general training. The problem of morale can be tempered by providing better working environments. The issue of lack of time can be remedied by reducing the scope of the project to something more achievable; this may mean pushing non-essential features to a subsequent phase. Besides this, the business can employ more staff and/or outsource the development of well-defined modules to external contractors.

The real problem lies in the reluctance to tackle technical debt, since the biggest cause of technical debt is the existing technical debt. Any new code that depends on the bad code will very soon become part of the technical debt and incur further debt down the line.