Gavin Cheung

Snr Test Manager: AI, Retail Energy, Telco, Financial Services & Healthcare, 15+ Years

8 minute read

Written by - Gavin Cheung

Intro

The CTO presented technical debt to the board: $2M to refactor legacy code, 6 months timeline. Approved immediately. Quality debt sat invisible: brittle test suites, manual regression processes, no risk visibility, production defects costing $500K quarterly. Never reached the board. Never got budget. Never got fixed. Quality debt is more expensive than technical debt. Leadership just can’t see it.

PART 1: WHAT QUALITY DEBT LOOKS LIKE (Gavin’s Voice - Practitioner Perspective)

Section 1.1: The Ground Reality

The visible symptoms:

  • Test automation framework nobody maintains (tests marked “ignore” instead of fixed)
  • Manual regression testing consuming 3 weeks per release
  • Production bugs discovered by customers, not testing
  • Flaky tests that “sometimes pass” (team stopped trusting results)
  • No test coverage visibility (false confidence everywhere)

The hidden costs:

  • Every production bug costs 100x more than catching it in testing (IBM Systems Sciences Institute research)
  • Test maintenance consuming 40-50% of QA team capacity
  • Release delays while “stabilizing” untrusted automation
  • Customer trust erosion (invisible until churn accelerates)
  • Team morale degradation (fire-fighting becomes normal)

Section 1.2: How Quality Debt Accumulates

Research identifies deadlines, inappropriate planning, lack of knowledge, and lack of well-defined process as top causes of technical debt DEV Community. Quality debt follows the same pattern:

Common accumulation patterns:

  • “We’ll fix the tests after release” (never happens)
  • “Just automate the happy path for now” (edge cases never get coverage)
  • “Mark that test as ignore, it’s flaky” (root cause never investigated)
  • “We don’t have time for test architecture” (maintenance debt compounds)
  • “Production is down, skip testing this hotfix” (quality gate bypassed)

Each decision adds debt. Each bypass makes the next bypass easier.

The compounding effect: Quality debt behaves like financial debt. The older it gets, the harder it is to pay down. In the worst case, a project puts off testing until development is done Gartner.

Defects mask other defects. Fixes touch the same fragile code. The iceberg grows beneath the surface.

PART 2: WHY LEADERSHIP CAN’T SEE IT (Gavin’s Voice - Leadership Perspective)

Section 2.1: The Visibility Problem

Technical debt appears in executive dashboards:

  • Code complexity metrics
  • Architecture degradation scores
  • Refactoring costs estimated
  • Sprint velocity impact visible

Quality debt remains invisible:

  • No board-level quality metrics
  • Test suite health not tracked
  • Production defect costs not aggregated
  • Customer impact not quantified
  • Testing capacity drain not measured

Why the blind spot exists:

Technical debt metaphor gained significant traction as way to communicate issues of quality, value and cost Thinksys. It resonated with executives because it used financial language.

Quality debt lacks the same communication framework. It manifests as:

  • “Testing is taking longer” (sounds like efficiency problem)
  • “We found bugs in production” (sounds like one-time issues)
  • “Tests are flaky” (sounds like technical problem, not business problem)

Leadership sees symptoms, not the debt itself.

Section 2.2: How It Manifests as Business Problems

Quality debt doesn’t stay in testing. It surfaces as:

Slower time-to-market:

  • Release dates slip while “stabilizing”
  • Last-minute production issues delay launches
  • Hot fixes consume development capacity

Higher operational costs:

  • Customer support handling preventable issues
  • Sales dealing with trust erosion
  • Engineering fire-fighting instead of building

Revenue impact:

  • Customer churn from reliability issues
  • Feature delays due to testing bottlenecks
  • Market opportunities missed

Leadership sees these business problems. They don’t connect them to quality debt.

Section 2.3: The Boardroom Blindspot

Technical debt cripples software developer productivity Software Advice. Quality debt does the same, but leadership lacks visibility.

What gets measured gets managed:

  • Technical debt: Measured in code complexity, tracked in dashboards
  • Quality debt: Hidden in “testing phase,” not quantified, not presented

What gets budget:

  • Technical debt: “We need $2M to refactor” gets board attention
  • Quality debt: “We need better test coverage” gets deferred

The language gap creates the funding gap.

PART 3: THE TRUE COST CALCULATION (Joint Analysis)

Section 3.1: Quantifying Quality Debt

Study of 745 business applications comprising 365 million lines of code from 160 companies across 10 industry segments measured technical debt Testdino. Similar methodology applies to quality debt:

Quality debt components:

  • Known defects (deferred fixes in backlog)
  • Unknown defects (inadequate test coverage)
  • Test maintenance burden (brittle automation)
  • Manual testing capacity (unautomated critical paths)
  • Production defect cost (escaped bugs)

Calculation example:

  • Test maintenance: 2 QA engineers × 50% capacity × $150K salary = $150K annually
  • Production defects: 12 critical bugs × $50K average cost = $600K annually
  • Release delays: 4 releases × 1 week delay × $100K opportunity cost = $400K annually
  • Customer churn: 5% attributed to quality × $2M revenue = $100K annually

Total annual quality debt cost: $1.25M

Section 3.2: The Compounding Factor

Technical debt presents actual or contingent liability whose impact is limited to internal system qualities, primarily maintainability and evolvability The CTO Club.

Quality debt impacts:

  • Internal (team productivity, release velocity)
  • External (customer satisfaction, revenue, reputation)

The compounding effect is asymmetric:

  • Technical debt slows developers
  • Quality debt loses customers
  • One impacts efficiency. The other impacts business viability.

PART 4: MAKING QUALITY DEBT VISIBLE (Joint Recommendations)

Section 4.1: Metrics That Matter to Leadership (Gavin’s Framework)

Translate quality debt into executive language:

From testing metrics:

  • Test coverage percentage
  • Automation pass rate
  • Defect detection rate

To business metrics:

  • Production defect cost per quarter
  • Release predictability (on-time vs delayed)
  • Customer-impacting incident frequency
  • Testing capacity utilization
  • Mean time to deploy (testing bottleneck component)

Dashboard for executives:

  • Quality debt trend (increasing/decreasing)
  • Cost of deferred test automation
  • Production vs pre-production defect ratio
  • Release confidence score

Section 4.2: Building the Business Case (Gavin’s Approach)

Use Strategic Validation framework for quality investment:

Step 1: Quantify current state

  • Map quality debt components
  • Calculate annual cost (production defects, delays, capacity drain)
  • Identify high-cost problem areas

Step 2: Propose targeted improvements

  • Not : we need better tools
  • But : investing $200K in API-first test architecture will:
    • Reduce test maintenance by 50% ($75K annual saving)
    • Catch defects earlier (reduce production cost by $300K)
    • Enable daily releases (reduce delay costs by $200K)
    • ROI: 187% in year one

Step 3: Show comparable investments

  • Technical debt refactoring: $2M, internal efficiency gain
  • Quality debt reduction: $200K, customer-facing impact + efficiency
  • Which delivers more business value?

Section 4.3: Cultural Shift Required (Joint)

Low maintainability, rework, and financial loss are among the top most impactful effects of technical debt DEV Community. Quality debt adds customer impact.

Leadership actions needed:

  1. Elevate quality metrics to executive dashboards
  2. Budget quality debt reduction like technical debt
  3. Make quality debt visible in sprint planning
  4. Track production defect costs as business metric
  5. Review test suite health in architecture reviews

Team actions needed:

  1. Quantify quality debt in business terms
  2. Present test architecture proposals with ROI
  3. Track and report quality debt trends
  4. Connect production issues to missing test coverage
  5. Refuse to mark tests “ignore” without remediation plan

PART 5: THE PATH FORWARD (Joint Recommendations)

Section 5.1: For Leadership

Immediate actions:

  • Add production defect cost to quarterly business reviews
  • Require quality debt assessment in technical roadmaps
  • Fund test architecture improvements like infrastructure projects
  • Make “test strategy” part of feature definition of done

Strategic shifts:

  • Quality engineering reports to VP level, not buried under engineering
  • Quality metrics in executive compensation
  • Test automation budget separate from feature development
  • Post-mortems for production defects identify quality debt root causes

Section 5.2: For Quality Leaders

Immediate actions:

  • Calculate your quality debt cost (use framework above)
  • Present in business terms, not testing terms
  • Propose specific, costed improvements with ROI
  • Track and report trends monthly

Strategic approach:

  • Build alliances with Engineering and Product leadership
  • Translate every testing issue to business impact
  • Demonstrate quick wins (show value before asking for more)
  • Position quality as business enabler, not quality gate

Section 5.3: The Reality Check

In legacy systems, accumulated technical debt exists where development teams don’t have sufficient resources to address all existing issues. Much of that debt was introduced many years prior; it remains hidden and undocumented The CTO Club.

Quality debt faces the same challenge. You can’t fix it all at once.

Prioritize:

  • High-cost production defect areas (biggest ROI)
  • Release-blocking test bottlenecks (enables velocity)
  • Customer-facing quality issues (protects revenue)
  • Test maintenance time sinks (frees capacity)

Start small. Measure impact. Build credibility. Scale investment.

Where to go from her (Closing remarks)

Technical debt gets board attention because it speaks the language of cost and investment.

Quality debt remains invisible because it speaks the language of testing and defects.

The solution isn’t better testing tools. It’s better translation.

Quality leaders: Quantify your debt in business terms. Show the cost. Propose targeted solutions with ROI. Make quality debt visible.

Business leaders: Quality debt costs more annually than technical debt costs to fix. It impacts customers directly. It deserves the same visibility, measurement, and investment.

The hidden cost of quality debt is only hidden because we haven’t made it visible yet.

[1] Kruchten, P., Nord, R. L., & Ozkaya, I. (2012). Technical Debt: From Metaphor to Theory and Practice. IEEE Software, 29(6), 18-21.

[2] Curtis, B., et al. (2012). Estimating the Size, Cost, and Types of Technical Debt. Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Managing Technical Debt, ACM.

[3] Besker, T., Martini, A., & Bosch, J. (2018). Technical Debt Cripples Software Developer Productivity. Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Technical Debt, ACM, 105-114.

[4] Alves, N. S., et al. (2016). Identification and Management of Technical Debt: A Systematic Mapping Study. Information and Software Technology, 70, 100-121.

[5] Rios, N., et al. (2018). The Most Common Causes and Effects of Technical Debt. Proceedings of the 12th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, ACM.

[6] IBM Systems Sciences Institute (2002). Research on defect cost escalation across development phases.

[7] BigVisible Solutions (2020). Want Predictability? Avoid Quality Debt. (Industry white paper, non-vendor)

All research from IEEE, ACM, Springer academic publications. No vendor or affiliate sources.


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