One of the causes of such technical debt is turnover. I've been in teams where the headcount has stayed the same for 10 years and technical debt is kept low. I'

One of the causes of such technical debt is turnover. I've been in teams where the headcount has stayed the same for 10 years and technical debt is kept low. I've been on projects where people are continually coming and going and adding functionality gets rewarded - this leads to the most debt as you get nothing from cleaning up code.