--- title: Are Your App Developers Making Your Technical Debt Better or Worse? description: Learn what technical debt is, how developers create it without telling you, and what to ask your team before slow builds and rising costs become the norm. image: https://weareaffective.com/hubfs/learning-centre-images/are-your-app-developers-making-your-technical-debt-better-or-worse.webp --- [Skip to content](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/are-your-app-developers-making-your-technical-debt-better-or-worse#main-content) [![we\_are\_affective\_logo\_200](https://weareaffective.com/hs-fs/hubfs/we_are_affective_logo_200.png?width=175&height=48&name=we_are_affective_logo_200.png "we_are_affective_logo_200")](https://weareaffective.com) - [Home](https://weareaffective.com) - About Us - [Our Story](https://weareaffective.com/about) - [How We Work](https://weareaffective.com/how-we-work) - Our Services - [App Planning & Strategy](https://weareaffective.com/app-planning-strategy) - [App Design](https://weareaffective.com/app-design-agency) - [App UX Design](https://weareaffective.com/app-ux-design) - [App UI Design](https://weareaffective.com/app-ui-design) - [App Technical Architecture](https://weareaffective.com/app-architecture) - [Existing App Audits](https://weareaffective.com/app-audit) - [Case Studies](https://weareaffective.com/case-studies) - [Pricing](https://weareaffective.com/pricing) - [Learning Centre](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre) - [Get Started](https://weareaffective.com/get-started) Expert Guide Series # Are Your App Developers Making Your Technical Debt Better or Worse? Table of Contents Spend enough time working on digital products and you notice a pattern. A client arrives with a product that launched well, held up for a year or two, and then started to slow. New features take longer than they should. Bugs appear in places nobody touched. Developers start using phrases like "it's complicated" or "we'd need to refactor that first." The app still works, technically, but building on it feels like renovating a house where the walls are holding up the roof. > The debt accumulates quietly, and by the time it surfaces, it has usually become far more expensive to fix than it ever needed to be. That is technical debt. And the difficult thing about it is that it is almost always invisible to the people paying for the product, right up until the point where it becomes unavoidable. The question worth asking is how technical debt gets created in the first place, who is responsible for it, and how you can tell whether your development team is managing it or quietly making it worse. We have seen this play out across a range of products, and the patterns are consistent enough to be worth laying out plainly. ## What Technical Debt Actually Is (and Why It Looks Invisible at First) Technical debt is what happens when a development team takes a shortcut today that creates extra work tomorrow. Sometimes that is a deliberate trade-off, where speed to market matters more than a clean solution. Sometimes it happens by accident, because a junior developer solved a problem in a way that works but does not scale. And sometimes it happens because nobody asked the [right questions at the architecture stage](https://weareaffective.com/app-architecture-design-we-are-affective). The word "debt" is well chosen. Like financial debt, small amounts are manageable. You can carry some and still function. But when it compounds and never gets paid down, it starts to affect everything. Developers spend more time working around existing problems than building new things. The codebase becomes fragile in ways that are hard to explain to a non-technical client. According to a [ScienceDirect empirical study on technical debt](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167642318301035), teams spend roughly 25% of their development time dealing with it. That is a quarter of every sprint, every month, every year going not into features or improvements but into managing the consequences of earlier decisions. The reason it stays invisible for so long is that a product with significant technical debt can still look and feel functional. Users do not see the code. They see screens, buttons, and flows. The debt only surfaces when you try to change something, add something, or when a part of the system that was under strain finally gives way. ## How Developers Create Technical Debt Without Telling You Technical debt is often the result of pressure, whether from deadlines, budgets, or clients who want features faster than the architecture can support them cleanly. But the way debt gets created matters, because some of it is avoidable with the right process and the right conversations. One of the most common routes is [skipping discovery on a specific component](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/what-are-the-most-common-mistakes-startups-make-when-building-their-first-app). We saw this clearly on a dating app project focused on verified profiles and preventing bots. The client wanted to skip discovery on the messaging component and focus purely on the onboarding process. What we ended up building was a generic messaging feature that directly contradicted the product's core premise. It allowed automated messages and fake messages, which undid all the verification work done in onboarding. The entire messaging section had to be rewritten. That cost approximately £15,000 in additional budget and two months of extra work. Another route is [choosing the wrong integration approach early](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/how-much-does-it-cost-to-build-an-event-management-app-like-eventbrite) on. On an alcohol buying and selling platform we worked on, the architecture required embedding web elements rather than building a proper API layer. That single structural decision added approximately 20% uplift in work across the entire project. Because the client wanted to hold the budget steady, we had to drop features towards the end to compensate. The debt was not hidden, it showed up immediately in scope and cost. Ask your development team to name the three biggest architectural decisions made in the last six months and explain the trade-offs each one involved. If they cannot, that is a problem in itself. ## Design built to *grow* your product We give your app the strategic and design foundations it needs to launch well and keep growing. Research, UX/UI design and technical specs ready for your development team. [See how we work](https://weareaffective.com/how-we-work) [Get started](https://weareaffective.com/get-started) No commitment ## The Warning Signs Your Codebase Is Already in Trouble There are signals that appear well before a codebase becomes genuinely unworkable. The problem is that clients often do not know what they are looking at, and developers do not always surface them unprompted. Knowing what to watch for puts you in a much better position to ask the right questions. The most common signs are behavioural rather than technical. Estimates start creeping upward for tasks that used to be quick. Developers qualify every answer with caveats about what else might break. A change in one part of the app produces an unexpected bug somewhere else entirely. These are symptoms of a codebase that has become tightly coupled in ways that make safe changes harder. > When a change in one part of the app breaks something entirely unrelated, the architecture has become too tangled to work with safely. A more concrete signal is the absence of meaningful feedback from users. In mobile apps, silence is not approval. Users abandon apps without filing complaints or cancellation reasons, and their [silence often masks a poor experience](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/how-to-read-a-user-session-recording-for-emotional-signal-rather-than-task-compl) or a product that has stopped feeling relevant. Without proactively tracking retention and engagement, a team can mistake no negative feedback for product success, and keep building on a foundation that users have already quietly walked away from. #### Questions worth asking your team - How long does it take to deploy a small change to production? - What percentage of sprint time goes to bug fixes versus new features? - Are there parts of the codebase that developers avoid touching? - When was the last time a dependency or framework was updated? ## When Skipping the Right Architecture Costs You Features and Budget The most expensive architectural mistakes are the ones that feel like savings at the time. Choosing a faster, cheaper integration method, skipping a layer of discovery, or [building on top of an existing codebase](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/5-things-that-make-the-difference-between-so-so-apps-and-stellar-apps-what-your-) without fully understanding its constraints can all look like pragmatic decisions until the bill arrives later. The alcohol buying and selling platform is a clear illustration. The forced use of embedded web elements instead of a proper API layer was not a catastrophic failure, the product was built and it worked. But that single decision quietly added a fifth of the total workload across the entire project. Features that should have been included were dropped because there was no budget left to build them properly. The client got a smaller product than they planned for, and the cost of that gap was invisible in the moment the architectural decision was made. A [2020 McKinsey survey](https://blog.allegro.tech/2022/06/debt-reduction-in-the-product-roadmap.html) found that technical debt can account for up to 40% of the total technology value of a product. At that level, it stops being a background cost and starts actively limiting what a business can do with its own product. Before committing to any integration approach, ask your team to map out two or three alternatives and estimate the long-term maintenance cost of each. The cheapest option at build time is rarely the cheapest option across the product's lifetime. #### Where architectural shortcuts show up in cost | Shortcut taken | Where the cost appears | Typical consequence | | --- | --- | --- | | Skipping API layer | Throughout the build | 20% uplift in total work (alcohol platform) | | Skipping component discovery | Rebuild phase | £15,000 extra, two months lost (dating app) | | Not addressing debt incrementally | Late in product lifecycle | Full core rework required (communications product) | ## How Deferred Debt Eventually Breaks the Product Itself There is a communications product we worked on for an extended period, built around trust and security as its core value. Technical debt accumulated across multiple release cycles, and each time we raised it, the client declined to allocate time to address it. The reasoning was always understandable in the moment, there were features to ship, deadlines to hit, budget to protect. The debt kept building. Eventually the product became fragile in ways that could no longer be managed around. For most products, some fragility is a manageable inconvenience. For a [product whose entire value proposition rested](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/why-does-our-competitor-feel-more-trusted-even-when-our-product-is-better) on being trustworthy and secure, fragility was an existential problem. At that point, there was no choice left. Core mechanisms had to be reworked, core flows had to be rebuilt, and the intervention was far larger and more disruptive than it would have been if the debt had been managed incrementally across those earlier release cycles. Simon's words on that project have stayed with us: "It wasn't until the actual technical debt became so great that the fragility of the product became an issue." By then, the cost of addressing it dwarfed what regular maintenance would have required. The lesson is not that you should never carry debt, sometimes it is the right trade-off. The lesson is that deferred debt does not stay static. It grows, and at some point it starts degrading the product itself. ## Why Clients Often Accelerate the Problem Without Realising It Development teams do not create technical debt in isolation. Clients play a significant role, often without realising it. The most common pattern is scope pressure, a constant [push to add more features before](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/what-are-the-most-common-mistakes-startups-make-when-building-their-first-app) the existing architecture is ready to support them cleanly. We experienced this directly on a sports club app project. The two co-founders were deeply embedded in the world the app was built for. The app was the business itself, not a marketing tool, so they were professionally and emotionally close to every decision. Both founders independently and consistently pushed to add more features. Each was convinced their additions were obvious and already implied by what had been agreed. Holding scope against that kind of pressure is genuinely difficult. We warned them early that the budget would spiral and that they risked running out of funding before launching anything. Those warnings were noted and then set aside. The project ended with the entire budget exhausted, nothing published to the app store, and both parties parting ways. Every feature that was added instead of being staged for a later release contributed to that outcome. The grassroots football app followed a similar pattern, where the client kept comparing individual features against best-in-class single-purpose competitors and insisting the product needed to do more. Despite our efforts to build something cohesive, the result was overly complex, too verbose, and not fit for its core purpose. The problem was structural, too many things in one product, but the client's instinct was always to add rather than to focus. If your development team is raising concerns about scope, treat those conversations as architectural warnings, not project management friction. They are usually both. ## What to Ask Your Development Team to Know Where You Stand Most clients do not know what questions to ask about technical debt because it is invisible to them by default. The right questions are about transparency, prioritisation, and what is being traded off in order to hit deadlines or budgets. A team that manages debt well will be able to answer these questions without hesitation. A team that avoids them, or answers only in reassurances, is worth pressing harder. #### Questions that surface how debt is being managed 1. What technical debt did we knowingly take on in the last quarter, and why? 2. Is there a part of the codebase that would need significant rework before we could build the next major feature? 3. Are there dependencies or integrations that are holding us back from moving faster? 4. What would it cost in time and budget to address the three largest areas of existing debt? 5. Are there parts of the architecture that were built for a different version of the product and no longer fit what we are building now? The answer to the last question is particularly revealing. As products evolve, early architectural decisions can become constraints that nobody named as constraints. On the memory-sharing proof-of-concept we worked on, switching from Spotify to Deezer and using the official Deezer API in the way it was designed to be used actually simplified the architecture. Working with Spotify without a proper API would have required significant workarounds and custom-built technical solutions. The right integration choice removed debt rather than creating it. That kind of outcome only becomes visible if somebody is asking the right questions at the right stage. ## How to Manage Technical Debt Before It Manages You Managing technical debt is an ongoing practice, and the teams that do it well treat it as a regular line item in the development process rather than something to address once it becomes a crisis. The most practical approach is to build debt remediation into every release cycle. Even allocating 10 to 15 percent of each sprint to addressing known debt keeps it from compounding. The alternative is what happened on the communications product, deferral until the fragility of the system forced a large, disruptive intervention. [Discovery also matters more than most clients](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/what-a-development-team-actually-needs-to-know-about-the-user-before-sprint-one) expect. Skipping it on a single component of a dating app cost £15,000 and two months. That is the cost of one shortcut on one feature. Discovery is the stage where architectural decisions get made with enough information to make them well. Cutting it to save time at the start reliably costs more time and money further in. It is also worth being honest about what you are asking your developers to build on top of. Applying a new interaction or emotional design layer on top of an existing codebase is possible, but it requires real care. On a wellness genetics product we worked on, a [luxury-looking visual design was handed to developers](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/why-do-some-apps-feel-like-they-were-made-just-for-you) working with an existing functional codebase. The handoff went through an intermediary designer, which added further distance between the design intent and what the code could actually support. Managing that gap required active effort on both sides. #### A basic debt management framework 1. Name the debt when it is taken on, with a note on why and what it will cost to address later. 2. Allocate time in each sprint specifically for remediation, not just new features. 3. Review architectural decisions at major product milestones, not just at the start of the project. 4. Surface debt in client conversations as a budget and timeline issue, not a technical one. ## Conclusion Technical debt is a product problem, and it belongs in conversations between clients and development teams from the very beginning of a project. The teams that manage it well are the ones who name it when they take it on, plan to address it, and treat it as a real cost rather than a background inconvenience. The projects we have described here, the communications product, the sports club app, the dating app, the alcohol platform, share a common thread. In each case, the debt was visible to the people building the product before it became visible to the people paying for it. The gap between those two moments of visibility is where most of the cost lives. Closing that gap means asking better questions, earlier. It means treating discovery as an investment rather than overhead. And it means being willing to hear from your development team that the faster path today will cost more tomorrow, and taking that seriously rather than pushing ahead anyway. If you want to understand where your product stands and what it would take to build on it sustainably, [let's talk about your codebase](https://weareaffective.com/get-started). ## Frequently Asked Questions What exactly is technical debt and why does it matter? Technical debt is the accumulated cost of shortcuts taken during development, where quick fixes today create extra work tomorrow. Like financial debt, small amounts are manageable, but when it compounds without being paid down, it slows development and makes the codebase fragile. Research suggests that teams spend roughly 25% of their development time dealing with technical debt rather than building new features. Why is technical debt so difficult to spot as a non-technical client? A product carrying significant technical debt can still look and feel completely functional to end users, who only see screens, buttons, and flows rather than the underlying code. The problems only become visible when you try to add or change something, or when a part of the system that has been under strain finally breaks. By the time it surfaces, it has usually become far more expensive to address than it needed to be. How do developers create technical debt without clients realising? Debt often accumulates through shortcuts taken under pressure from tight deadlines, limited budgets, or requests for faster delivery than the architecture can cleanly support. It can also arise when junior developers solve problems in ways that work initially but do not scale, or when the right architectural questions are never asked at the outset. Skipping discovery on individual components is a particularly common and costly source of technical debt. What are the warning signs that a development team is making technical debt worse? Common warning signs include developers using phrases like 'it's complicated' or 'we'd need to refactor that first' when asked about straightforward changes. New features taking disproportionately long to build, or bugs appearing in areas of the code that nobody has recently touched, are also reliable indicators. If your team seems to spend more time working around existing problems than building new things, debt is likely compounding. Can technical debt ever be a reasonable trade-off? Yes, in some circumstances taking on technical debt is a deliberate and sensible decision, particularly when speed to market matters more than a perfectly clean solution. The key distinction is whether the debt is conscious and documented, with a clear plan to pay it down, or whether it is accumulating silently without anyone acknowledging it. Managed debt is very different from debt that compounds unchecked. What happens if you skip discovery on part of a project to save time? Skipping discovery on even a single component can create serious problems, as the example in the article illustrates. A dating app that skipped discovery on its messaging feature ended up building something that directly contradicted the product's core premise around verified profiles, meaning the entire section had to be rewritten. The time and money saved by skipping discovery was far outweighed by the cost of redoing the work. How much does technical debt actually cost a development team over time? According to an empirical study published on ScienceDirect, development teams spend approximately 25% of their time dealing with technical debt. That amounts to a quarter of every sprint and every project budget going not into new features or improvements but into managing the consequences of earlier decisions. Over the course of a year, that is a substantial cost that most clients are unaware they are absorbing. What can be done to keep technical debt under control during a project? Ensuring that proper discovery is carried out at the architecture stage, including for individual components and not just the overall product, is one of the most effective preventive measures. Development teams should also be having honest conversations with clients about trade-offs rather than quietly taking shortcuts to meet deadlines. 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