The Hidden Costs of Technical Debt: Strategies for Sustainable Development

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At BluShift, we believe growth comes from honest reflection. This time, we're handing over the keyboard to Reitu Malane, Product Engineer at BluShift, to share real-world insights in this edition of Shifted Perspectives.

Reitu explores how technical debt accumulates in ways we don't always expect, beyond rushed deadlines and quick fixes. In this piece, she explores the hidden factors that shape software development and why some of the costliest challenges aren't purely technical..

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In the race to deliver software quickly, we often make compromises that seem insignificant at the time. A quick workaround here, a temporary fix there, all with the promise that we'll come back and do it properly later. This is technical debt in action, and like financial debt, it accrues interest over time. The longer it remains unpaid, the more it costs your organisation in the long run.

The True Cost of Technical Debt

Technical debt silently erodes organisational effectiveness in ways financial statements fail to capture. When developers dedicate substantial time navigating complex, under-documented code, productivity suffers dramatically. This inefficiency cascades into mounting maintenance demands, with critical systems requiring frequent emergency interventions that can consume the majority of IT budgets in severe cases.

As solutions built with shortcuts lack proper documentation, knowledge becomes concentrated among original developers, creating costly onboarding friction and knowledge transfer problems when team members change. Perhaps most damaging, technical debt gradually fosters a cultural resistance to necessary changes, stifling innovation and hampering an organisation's ability to adapt to evolving market demands.

How Technical Debt Gets Created: A Real-World Example

The Case of the Over-Engineered Onboarding

A while back, our development team was asked to create an onboarding flow. The requirement seemed straightforward: provide a brief introduction step as part of the onboarding flow to orient new users.

In trying to serve our client’s requests, the simple feature gradually grew into a product tutorial walkthrough system, built with 24+ pages, spanning multiple steps across different user types.

While technically well-executed, this created several challenges:

• Scope Expansion: The team built a comprehensive user product tour instead of a basic onboarding step, forming part of a 3 step onboarding flow - two different features with different purposes

• Maintenance Burden: We now had 24+ pages to maintain across 4 user types, instead of a simple 3-step universal flow

• Limited Accessibility: Educational content became trapped in a one-time experience instead of being accessible when users actually needed it

• Redundant Implementation: Similar functionality was repeated across multiple user types

Upon reviewing the implementation, we realised that the true cost of this feature not only extended the delivery time but also impacted our ability to maintain the source code. Future developers would need to maintain dozens of complex tutorial pages, and, we still needed to build the actual onboarding step.

The Root Cause: Technical and Communication Failures

This wasn't just a failure of technical execution-it was a failure of requirements clarity, validation, and early communication.

The Technical Failure:

A "Guided tips/intro" step was interpreted as a product tour instead of a brief orientation. No implementation review caught the misalignment before significant effort was invested.

The Communication Failure:

The uncomfortable truth was that the team knew this would accrue issues, but in an effort to cater to client desires, we left those concerns unvoiced. As the feature was being developed, questions arose about its scope and approach. The extensive tutorial system didn't align with the goal of quick onboarding, but those concerns stayed silent.

Why? The usual reasons many of us can relate to:

• Uncertainty: "Maybe I'm misunderstanding the requirements"

• Conflict avoidance: "It's already in progress, speaking up now might cause friction"

• Self-doubt: "What if I'm wrong and waste everyone's time?"

The result? Concerns that could have redirected the work in a 15-minute conversation instead festered until they required significant rework during formal implementation review.

The Lesson: The Cost of Silence

Technical debt doesn't just come from quick fixes and shortcuts.

It also comes from:

• Over-interpretation of requirements without clarification

• Building the wrong thing well instead of the right thing

• Skipping implementation reviews that validate approach before coding

• Assuming intent instead of confirming scope

• Staying silent when something feels off

This last point is crucial. Early feedback is far cheaper than late corrections. Organisations need to actively create environments where early questions are welcomed, healthy skepticism is valued, and redirecting work early is seen as a positive contribution rather than an obstacle.

Strategies for Managing Technical Debt

Five Key Approaches

1. Make Technical Debt Visible: Create a technical debt register tracking known issues, impacts, and resolution costs. Implement a "debt wall" during sprint planning to keep issues visible and prevent debt from becoming normalised.

2. Create Psychological Safety: Foster an environment where concerns can be voiced early without fear. The cost of feedback increases dramatically over time, from a 1-hour discussion at 10% progress to weeks of rebuilding after completion.

3. Validate Before Building: Conduct implementation reviews before significant development to verify alignment with requirements. Ask: "Are we building the right thing?" These checkpoints prevent misdirected effort.

4. Follow the Boy Scout Rule: Leave code better than you found it. Small, incremental improvements during regular development collectively reduce debt without dedicated refactoring sprints.

5. Balance Development Cycles: Allocate 20% of development time (roughly one day per week) to improving existing systems rather than building new features, ensuring continuous improvement.

Finding Balance

Technical debt is unavoidable, the key is choosing which shortcuts are worth taking. By carefully tracking and addressing the most critical issues while accepting some temporary compromises, teams can balance immediate delivery needs with long-term code health. This approach keeps development nimble and costs down, allowing your technology to support business growth rather than hinder it.