Effects of tehnical debt

From the perspective of a Product Manager or Product Owner, technical debt could create many effects. Here is a quick summary of how technical debt could affect the value delivered by a team:

A. Technical debt increases the time spent on managing complexity, and this further generates

  1. Loss of estimation accuracy
  2. Bugs become harder to fix and also an increase in reopened bugs
  3. A decrease in speed of development for new features

B. Technical debt will increase the number of bugs in production, which will further generate:

  1. More time spent in fixing and retesting per iteration
  2. Less time available to dedicate to new features
  3. Unhappy Customers
  4. Diminishing revenue

C. Technical debt reduces the ability to estimate

  1. More things to take into account when estimating
  2. Unexpected bugs appear during development which cannot be taken into account while estimating

D. Technical debt reduces knowledge sharing

  1. Reduces the cross-functional ability
  2. People do not talk about technical debt, so new team members hardly know about it
  3. People avoid talking about parts of architecture with a lot of technical debt

Above all the main effect is reducing value delivered to customer and the impact it has on quality.

Actually the effects of technical debt increases with time.