How to Identify, Break, and Prevent Technical Debt in Software Projects

1. What Is Technical Debt?

Technical debt, a term coined by Ward Cunningham in 1992, describes the trade‑off of delivering software quickly at the expense of code quality, similar to borrowing money and paying interest later. Like financial debt, it is hard to measure and can lead to an endless repayment spiral, affecting developers throughout their careers.

2. The Vicious Cycle of Technical Debt

Technical debt continuously reduces development efficiency, making each new feature harder to implement and slowing business progress. This creates frustration for developers, fuels endless debates between newcomers and veterans, and ultimately degrades a team's technical competitiveness, leading to lower business value and potential team dissolution.

3. How Technical Debt Is Generated

Copy‑paste development: Teams replicate code across projects without proper refactoring, only realizing the cost when performance suffers.

“We must ship now”: Excuses such as “the domain is complex,” “the situation is special,” or “time is tight” are used to sacrifice quality, but sacrificing quality does not actually save time.

“We’ll refactor later”: Promising future refactoring often becomes an empty promise, turning into another debt‑creating cycle.

“Writing code solves everything”: Over‑reliance on code leads to massive, low‑value duplication that increases maintenance cost.

4. How to Solve Technical Debt

Make Technical Debt Measurable

Exposing problems is the first step to solving them; when debt becomes visible, teams are more willing to address it.

Tools like Jarchitect can evaluate code debt based on defined rules, allowing continuous monitoring across repositories.

Solutions

Declare bankruptcy (full rewrite): Retire an old system and replace it with a new one, especially when maintenance costs are prohibitive.

Incremental, backward‑compatible migration: Build a new system that gradually absorbs old functionality, using tests to ensure stability while phasing out legacy code.

Prevent Future Debt

Understanding the root causes—misaligned expectations, rushed timelines, and copy‑paste habits—helps teams adopt the right attitude and avoid accumulating new debt.

5. My Five‑Year Experience Tackling Technical Debt at Alibaba

During my first project, we rewrote a severely legacy‑laden system using a “bankruptcy” approach. Later, we migrated multiple applications into a single platform, decommissioning old services through backward‑compatible migration.

Afterword

Inspired by a series of articles on software projects, I translated and studied them to better understand technical debt and share these insights.