Quantifies the immense financial and productivity costs of technical debt and rapid code decay in complex software libraries.
Technical debt consumes 42% of a developer's working week (13.5 hours on debt and 3.8 hours on bad code), resulting in nearly $85 billion in global annual opportunity cost. In 2020, total software technical debt was estimated at $1.31 trillion—representing 20-40% of the total value of a technology estate—and has been increasing at a rate of 14% since 2018. For complex rich text editor (RTE) components, code decay is so rapid that only 30% of original code remains after 5 years, with RTE-specific technical debt accounting for 29% of ongoing development spend compared to the 18% industry average. Browser updates alone (e.g., 117 changes to Chrome in 2021) force an average of 8 unplanned patches per year for interface components.
The whitepaper notes that untouched code, after enough time, probably needs work and that environments change at blistering speeds (e.g., 43 Chrome updates in 2021).
relying on code that is no longer compatible with modern browser and security environments
stale releases are a primary indicator of code decay and the accumulation of technical debt that leads to functional breakage.
Only 30% of the original code remains after 5 years... the rest has been refactored, upgraded, repaired or replaced.
Risk Guard does not provide a decay or code-churn metric that predicts how much of a package will likely need to be replaced within a certain timeframe.
Risk Guard would be better if it estimated the 'Maintenance Forecast' or 'Projected Churn' for a package based on historical code decay rates.