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Quality debt is not a settled replacement for technical debt. It is a newer label with at least two competing meanings: one that counts the effort needed to fix defects already in a product, and a broader one that counts any compromise against a software quality goal. Technical debt, by contrast, is usually defined around internal design and implementation choices that make future change more expensive. Understanding which meaning a writer, vendor, or team intends matters more than deciding whether the phrase is “new.”
Why the title’s claim needs qualifying
The phrase “is the new” suggests that the software industry has moved from one accepted concept to another. The sources reviewed for this article do not show that. Technical debt remains the established term in the academic and practitioner literature, and quality debt appears mostly in practitioner writing from the last decade. A systematic mapping study of technical debt by Li and colleagues (2015) warns that the debt metaphor is often stretched to cover an expanding set of quality issues, which makes labels less precise over time. Treat quality debt as a useful, still-fluid term rather than a successor.
Two definitions of quality debt
The defect-focused definition
The earliest widely cited definition comes from David Hammerslag’s 2013 blog post, as summarized by InfoQ in its 2014 article “Managing your Software Debt.” InfoQ quotes Hammerslag as saying: “Quality Debt is a measure of the effort needed to fix the defects existent in a software product at any given point in time.” In this sense, quality debt is a backlog-style measure. It asks how much work stands between the product as it is and a product without known defects.
Because the definition is tied to defects, it is easiest to apply to bugs that have been found, logged, and triaged. It says little about defects nobody has discovered yet, and it does not by itself tell you whether a defect is cosmetic or severe.
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The broader quality-goal definition
A 2025 article by Sven Mohr at doubleSlash, “Quality debt: The key to better software quality through a new focus” (published 10 October 2025), uses a wider frame. Here quality debt covers compromises made against software quality goals, including choices affecting code, architecture, and documentation. The idea is to manage quality as an organizational concern, not only as a defect count.
The broader version is more useful for planning, but it is also more elastic. A team that adopts it has to say which categories count, or the term can come to mean “anything we would like to improve.”
How quality debt differs from technical debt
Ward Cunningham’s original framing of technical debt, reproduced in the O’Reilly book Managing Software Debt: Building for Inevitable Change, describes it this way: “Technical Debt includes those internal things that you choose not to do now, but which will impede future development if left undone. This includes deferred refactoring.” The emphasis is on internal choices whose cost arrives later, usually as slower changes.
A Software Engineering Institute-hosted paper, “Technical Debt Reifies an Abstract Concept,” makes a related point: low external quality and current defects can be a poor fit for the technical-debt label, because their effect on the product is often immediate and visible to users. That is the core of the distinction. Technical debt is about the future cost of internal structure. Defect-focused quality debt is about the present cost of known faults. The broader quality-debt definition sits between the two and borrows from both.
In practice the categories overlap. A poorly structured module can cause defects, and a defect fix can leave behind structural debt. The distinction is best used as a model for deciding what to track, not as a strict taxonomy.
Comparing the three framings
| Framing | What it counts | Best used for | Main limitation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Defect-focused quality debt (Hammerslag, 2013) | Effort needed to repair defects present in a product | Known bugs and their repair burden | Ignores undiscovered defects and internal structure |
| Broader quality debt (doubleSlash, 2025) | Compromises against code, architecture, documentation, and quality goals | Organization-wide quality planning | Scope can expand without clear boundaries |
| Technical debt (Cunningham, as reproduced in O’Reilly’s book preview) | Internal design or implementation choices that will slow future development | Deciding where to refactor and how to justify it | Does not cover immediate user-visible defects well |
How to measure quality debt
No common, validated metric for quality debt has been established, and no reliable conversion of it into a dollar figure is standard. The measures that appear in the cited sources are operational choices: estimated repair effort for known defects, or a count of tracked quality-debt items. Teams should state their measure before they publish a trend, because a count and an effort estimate will move differently over time.
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The doubleSlash article recommends documenting quality-debt items and tracking them quantitatively. A local register that does this can use the following fields:
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- Affected quality goal: for example reliability, security, maintainability, or documentation.
- Evidence: the test result, incident, review comment, or metric that shows the problem.
- User and business impact: who is affected and how.
- Technical risk: what could go wrong if the item stays open.
- Estimated remediation effort: an agreed unit, such as engineer-days, with the estimate’s basis noted.
- Owner and review date: who decides, and when the item is reconsidered.
This structure is a local practice drawn from the recommendations to document, prioritize, and quantify. It is not an industry standard, and it should be adapted rather than copied.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Practices attributed to the sources
The InfoQ summary of Hammerslag’s post lists practices aimed at finding and fixing defects earlier: a Definition of Done, behavior-driven or automated acceptance testing, continuous integration, automated testing, and not tolerating “broken windows,” meaning small defects left in place until they become normal. These are presented as recommendations from that source. The reviewed material does not show that any one of them reliably outperforms the others, and the list should be read as a starting point for a team’s own review.
Keeping the term precise
Quality debt is most useful when a team defines it once and applies it consistently. Before a term appears in a planning document or a dashboard, write down three things: whether it refers to defects, to broader quality-goal compromises, or to both; which categories are included; and how items are measured. Where a team also uses technical debt, keep the two lists separate enough that a reader can tell whether an item is a present defect or a future structural cost.
The Credit Suisse example described in a 2022 Taylor & Francis article on digital nudging for technical debt management shows how organizations can build their own debt categories. Those categories are specific to that organization and do not form a universal taxonomy.
The phrase “quality debt” is worth using when it clarifies what a team is tracking. It is not a sign that technical debt has been superseded.
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