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How To Successfully Recognise and Manage the 3 Different Types of Tech Debt

Ashley Peacock
Better Programming
Published in
6 min readNov 4, 2021

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Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Not all tech debt was created equally. Some tech debt could hamper your ability to rapidly iterate on your codebase, resulting in fewer features being released and less business value being unlocked.

On the flip side, some tech debt can be left alone for the time being, and you needn’t spend your precious time addressing it just yet.

It’s worth noting that this article is focussed on larger pieces of tech debt, and simple tech debt (e.g., extracting a method, renaming a class, etc.) do not need to follow the process outlined. I’m a firm believer that such refactoring should happen on an almost daily basis.

So, what are the different types of tech debt, and how should you manage your tech debt?

The Three Types of Tech Debt

First, let’s look at how we can categorise the different types of tech debt.

Active tech debt

Active tech debt is the first kind of acceptable tech debt, along with dormant tech debt below. It’s defined as — you know about it…

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Ashley Peacock
Ashley Peacock

Written by Ashley Peacock

Staff Software Engineer, Architect & Author

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