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Technical Debt and Security Debt

 Technical debt (also known as tech debt or code debt) describes what results when development teams take actions to expedite the delivery of a piece of functionality or a project which later needs to be refactored. In other words, it’s the result of prioritizing speedy delivery over perfect code.


It is like borrowing money to get something done faster than one typically can. Of course that comes at an interest, which in case of technical debt would be difficulty of managing code, "good" end user experience rather than a "great" experience.


Technical debt is not a mess! A mess is a mess.. Technical debt is simply a choice taken to expedite development in response to real project constraints.


By extension Security debt is simply an accumulation of security vulnerabilities that have not been addressed time to time. Security debit is a more serious problem as compared to the generic technical debt as it makes the infrastructure susceptible to the attackers. The older the vulnerabilities, larger the number of known exploits and easier for the attackers to exploit the vulnerabilities.

DevSecOps, if deployed well, should provide better opportunities to fix the vulnerabilities regularly and thereby bring down the security debt of the system.

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