The downsides of the technical debt repayment are visible to everyone: new bugs are introduced, changes are made and users have to adapt. There is trouble for e

The downsides of the technical debt repayment are visible to everyone: new bugs are introduced, changes are made and users have to adapt. There is trouble for everyone who is not the developer. The upside is visible only to developers in the short term. Sometimes a technical debt repayment may require a big change in business. I saw a banking system where the authorization framework was based on impresonation of users. Repaying the technical debt would mean going over all contracts and adjusting their conditions while developers implemented a more traditional role-based access control. Such a change was so unrealistic that middle management did not even talk about it until some day the project got outsourced and most developers — reassigned to other projects.