Proof that Technical Debt is Slowing You Down: Code Red
Data-Backed Confirmation: Technical Debt's Detrimental Impact, Unveiled!
If you prefer a presentation then I can recommend Code Red: The Business Impact of Code Quality • Adam Tornhill • GOTO 2022
Or you can read the whitepaper Code Red: The Business Impact of Code Quality – A Quantitative Study of 39 Proprietary Production Codebases | Adam Tornhill, Markus Borg
The resulting technical debt is estimated to waste up to 42% of developers’ time.
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By analyzing activity in 30,737 files, we find that low quality code contains 15 times more defects than high quality code.
Furthermore, resolving issues in low quality code takes on average 124% more time in development. Finally, we report that issue resolutions in low quality code involve higher uncertainty manifested as 9 times longer maximum cycle times. This study provides evidence that code quality cannot be dismissed as a technical concern.
With 15 times fewer defects, twice the development speed, and substantially more predictable issue resolution times, the business advantage of high quality code should be unmistakably clear.
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