Technical Debt Estimator
Enter your codebase metrics to estimate total technical debt in hours and story points. Get a debt ratio, severity classification, and a sprint plan recommendation to systematically pay it down.
Codebase Metrics
Estimated Technical Debt
Debt Breakdown
Enter metrics to see breakdown.
Sprint Paydown Plan
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What is technical debt?▼
Technical debt is the implied cost of future rework caused by choosing a quick, easy solution now instead of a better approach that would take longer. The term was coined by Ward Cunningham. Like financial debt, it accumulates interest — the longer you wait to pay it down, the harder (and slower) feature development becomes. Common sources: rushed features, outdated dependencies, missing tests, poor documentation.
How is technical debt measured in hours?▼
One common method (used by SQALE and SonarQube) assigns a remediation time to each type of issue: a code smell might cost 30 minutes to fix, a bug 2 hours, a missing test 1 hour per untested function. Summing these gives an estimated fix effort. This tool uses industry-average remediation constants to estimate total debt from your codebase metrics.
What is the technical debt ratio?▼
The technical debt ratio (TDR) = (remediation cost / estimated development cost) × 100%. Development cost is estimated as: lines of code × average cost per line (typically $1–5). A TDR below 5% is considered healthy. 5–10% is moderate — plan sprints to address it. Above 20% is unsustainable and will severely slow new feature development.
What is the difference between planned and unplanned debt?▼
Planned (strategic) debt is deliberately taken on to meet a deadline, with a clear plan to pay it back. Unplanned (accidental) debt accumulates through negligence, ignorance, or poor practices — no one decided to create it. Planned debt is manageable; unplanned debt compounds into 'big ball of mud' codebases. Tracking debt explicitly (in backlog, debt register) converts unplanned debt into managed debt.
How much time should we spend paying down tech debt?▼
The 'technical debt sprint' approach: dedicate 20% of each sprint to debt reduction — two days per two-week sprint. Google's SRE practice recommends 50% of SRE time on reliability/debt work. Martin Fowler's recommendation: never let debt exceed 5% TDR before dedicated paydown. Many teams use the 'boy scout rule': always leave code cleaner than you found it.