CAST now estimates technical debt to cost companies $3.61 per line of code.
35% of those items considered to be technical debt were severe enough to adversely affect support of the system studied, potentially resulting in security, performance or uptime issues.
Outsourced and in-house developed applications didn’t show any difference in structure quality. The same was true for onshore and offshore applications.
Java EE applications were the most prevalent among those studied and received significantly lower performance scores as well as carrying greater technical debt than other languages.
Established development methods such as agile and waterfall scored significantly better in structural quality than custom methods, while waterfall scored the highest in transferability and changeability.
COBOL applications scored the highest in security, while .NET applications received the lowest security scores.
Modularity of systems may contribute to lower quality and reduced performance.
Government systems tend to be the lowest in maintainability.
The more frequently the code is released the higher the technical debt.
