The Perils of Quantifying Technical Debt
Last year I visited an organization to help prioritize its technical debt. Prior to my arrival the team had evaluated a tool capable of quantifying technical debt. The tool measured a number of attributes such as the ratio of code comments and unit test coverage, and estimated how much effort would be needed to bring the codebase to a perfect score on all these implied quality dimensions. The organization threw this tool at its 15-year-old codebase, and the tool reported that they had accumulated 4,000 years of technical debt!
Of course, those estimated years of technical debt aren’t linear (see the following figure), as much debt had been created in parallel by the multitude of programmers working on ...
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