There&#x27;s a lot of ways to parse technical debt. The simplest one I&#x27;ve found, while it has its shortcomings, is this from a Deloitte article:<p>They state, in general, it costs $3.61 technical debt &#x2F; line of code.<p>&quot;Technical debt is a way to understand the cost of code quality and the impacts of architectural issues. For IT to help drive business innovation, managing technical debt is a necessity. Legacy systems can constrain growth because they may not scale; because they may not be extensible into new scenarios like mobile or analytics; or because underlying performance and reliability issues may put the business at risk.&quot; (Tech Trends 2014, Deloitte University Press).<p>It&#x27;s an easy to use metric to weigh the cost of supporting programs, and relatively simple for managers to understand. It has the added benefit of encouraging reducing the size of the code-base when possible.