Technical debt is like financial debt: taking shortcuts now means paying interest later. The interest comes as slower development, more bugs, and eventually—if left unchecked—total paralysis.
Adjust the parameters and watch how your codebase health evolves over 52 sprints (1 year).
Your Development Environment
How hard you're pushed to ship fast. Higher = more shortcuts.
Percentage of each sprint dedicated to paying down debt.
Larger teams accumulate debt faster (coordination overhead).
How much debt the codebase already has.
Velocity & Debt Over Time
Sprint 1 (Start)
Sprint 52 (End of Year)
What's happening
The debt dynamics
Debt accumulates when you take shortcuts. The rate depends on velocity pressure and team size (more people = more coordination debt).
Debt has interest: existing debt makes new development slower and generates more debt. This is the compounding effect that makes technical debt so dangerous.
Refactoring pays it down, but you're racing against the interest rate. If you don't allocate enough time, debt grows exponentially until velocity hits zero.
Bankruptcy is when debt exceeds 100%—the codebase becomes unmaintainable. At that point, you're choosing between a rewrite or abandonment.