Finding and Fixing Five Kinds of Architectural Technical Debt

Developers, architects, and application teams are constantly chasing to security risks to the more serious issue of architectural technical debt. Great tools exist to scan for source code quality and security, but tracking, baselining, and detecting architectural drift has been hard due to the lack of observability, tooling, and best practices.

What exactly is is actually defined by its architectural (monolithic) pattern which carries with it dense dependencies, long dependency chains, and in essence a big ball of mud that is opaque for any architect trying to understand and track. This is the essence of architectural technical debt: the class entanglements, deep dependencies, dead-code, long dependency chains, dense topologies, and lack of common code libraries that plague monoliths, older applications, and more recently even microservices that have begun to resemble monoliths themselves.