Coding in the red

Technical debt costs companies time, money, and customers. It is incurred each time a company prioritizes speed over quality in writing software. Sometimes the decision to do so is wise: time-to-market can make or break a business. But over years, even the costs of smart decisions add up, and four decades into the modern software age, it is clear the bill has come due.

While it began as a concept, tech debt evolved in recent years into a measurable problem that companies track. What is new is a global tally of the issue.

With the first-ever release of this data – tapping CAST’s analysis of over 10 billion lines of code – our research finds that global tech debt levels have reached 61 billion days in repair time. Drawn from 17 countries that represent 51% of the world’s GDP, this stark figure is also a conservative one.