Is Full-Stack Development an Answer to Technical Debt? A Closer Look

• By Nathan Smith
• 18-04-2025
• Technology

Introduction

According to Accenture’s Tech Debt Report, IT leaders significantly increased their spending on technical debt remediation from 2020 to 2023. Between 2020 and 2022, nearly 17% of their total budget was allocated to addressing technical debt, a figure that surpassed 24% in 2023. This trend highlights a direct link between technological advancements and growing technical debt— as IT investments rise, so do the costs of maintaining and addressing accumulated inefficiencies.

However, simply allocating more resources to debt remediation only works up to a point. Beyond that, it will only point to a company’s inefficiencies and over-indexing investments, not in areas that drive growth but those that hinder it.

In this write-up, we’ll uncover the hidden costs of technical debt, its consequences, and how full-stack development offers a structured approach to reducing it.

Breaking Down the Cost of Technical Debt

In the US alone, businesses incur as much as $2.41 trillion worth of annual technical debt costs, with an estimated $1.52 trillion needed for remediation. Imagine the same at a global scale, with the numbers only increasing (as of now).

This is because technical debt is an unavoidable byproduct of software development. It accumulates over several years for multiple reasons, including changing business goals and context, inefficiencies in the development process, and the structure and quality of dev teams.

The core, however, is that in software development, developers sometimes choose quick, easy workarounds instead of writing clean, well-structured code from scratch, often to meet tight deadlines, optimize resource utilization, and rush market entry.

While it seems to help in the short term, it nurtures vulnerabilities and issues, disrupting and slowing down development in the long term. Resolving these issues and optimizing performance often demand a lot more effort and resources than anticipated.

The Impact of Technical Debt

Technical debt is a lot more than just coding gaps; it can result in multiple, everyday headaches for development teams and also have significant financial implications if left unresolved. Here is how technical debt pans out:

1. Faster Development Now, Slower Growth Tomorrow

While it initially helps you move faster, it becomes harder to build as your code grows. Developers will have to spend more time identifying the underlying issue, fixing messy code, and troubleshooting, slowing down the overall project.

2. More Bugs and System Crashes

Quick fixes often result in fragile code. Over time, these fixes can lead to more bugs, system errors, and even app crashes.

3. Security Vulnerabilities

Taking shortcuts during development also makes it challenging to identify security flaws as crucial testing steps get skipped. These vulnerabilities can pile up, increasing the risk of data breaches and compliance issues.

4. Decision Paralysis for Product Teams

Technical debt also causes dilemmas and limits options for product managers. They have to prioritize activities, whether to innovate new features or to focus on technical clean-up and maintain the existing functionality only.

5. Hard-to-Scale Systems

Growing businesses must scale their software to handle more users, data, and features. However, with technical debt, your code isn’t flexible enough to accommodate more segments. Even simple additions can require massive rework.

And the list does not end here. Technical debt isn’t clearly just a coding issue; it’s a business bottleneck that, if left unattended, drains resources and frustrates your teams while also impacting their confidence and self-worth. In fact, according to Stack Overflow’s Annual Developer survey for 2024, technical debt is the most common frustration for more than 62% of developers.

Source: Stack Overflow - Annual Developer Survey 2024

Reducing Technical Debt with Full-Stack Development

According to a report published by Stripe, developers spend close to 13.5 hours a week on reducing technical debt by managing disjointed code and refining short-term fixes for longer-term stability. To reduce this time, full-stack development has emerged as a proven approach to ensure better structure, consistency, and long-term sustainability and maintainability of code. Here is how:

1. Less Fragmentation, Unified Code

Technical debt issues often arise when front-end and back-end teams work in silos. However, with full-stack development, you work with developers who handle both the front-end (what users see) and the back-end (the server, database, and APIs). This approach gives you a strategic position to identify gaps and manage them proactively.

2. Consistent Coding Standards

With a connected development team, you can ensure consistency in coding styles, logic, documentation, and methodologies. This enforces uniformity in development practices, reducing the risk of rework and eliminating redundant code that adds to technical debt.

3. Single-Perspective Code Review

Unlike siloed teams, where front-end and back-end developers review code separately, full-stack developers review code holistically and recommend changes after analyzing the overall impact. This ensures that changes in one area don’t create compatibility issues elsewhere.

4. Refactoring Becomes a Continuous Process

With full-stack development, you can gradually internalize refactoring. Some developers can update outdated functions, streamline dependencies, and optimize performance, while others continue to build the software and add more functionalities.

5. Easier Transition to Modular Software Development

Full-stack developers often emphasize component-driven software development. This includes using API-first approaches for the back-end and pre-built libraries and templates for the front-end. Such development practices reduce technical debt by preventing you from getting stuck in “legacy lock-in,” a primary cause of rising technical debt.

The Full-Stack Paradox: How it Can Fuel Technical Debt

While full-stack development is a practical approach to preventing technical debt, it is also prone to slip-ups precisely because full-stack developers are responsible for both the front-end and back-end.

1. The “Shortcut Syndrome” is common, even with full-stack developers.

Like others, even full-stack developers can fall prey to the pressure. They often work across front-end, back-end, databases, and APIs, managing multiple tasks under tight deadlines. This pressure can tempt them to take shortcuts, such as:

• Skipping proper documentation for faster feature rollouts.
• Hardcoding quick fixes instead of building flexible, scalable solutions.
• Ignoring long-term maintainability by writing code that “just works” for now.

These patchwork code fixes result in nothing but highly fragile code that causes issues later on in the process.

2. Full-stack developers must handle the increased cognitive load.

In addition to coding, developers must also “think” about optimizing the front-end for end users, securing data flows and back-end APIs, managing databases, and periodically testing. This cognitive load (in addition to the actual execution) makes it difficult for them to focus on every aspect of the application, causing them to overlook individual performance optimizations.

3. There’s always a risk of developer burnout.

The breadth of responsibilities and workload full-stack developers handle also places them at a higher risk of burnout. Additionally, long hours, context-switching, collaborating with other teams, and proactive problem-solving also affect their productivity and decision-making capabilities.

It has been established that even this holistic approach to managing technical debt can be overwhelming, especially if implemented without experience and expertise. A foolproof strategy, in this case, will be to venture into full-stack development with the right level of professional support.

Solving the Full-Stack Paradox with Professional Support

Outsourcing Full-Stack Development to Experienced Teams or Hiring Dedicated Developers

The risks of shortcut fixes, cognitive overload, and developer burnout often stem from limited bandwidth, lack of expertise, and the pressure to deliver quickly. However, with external full-stack support, you can optimize the process and free up internal resources for other high-value tasks, such as innovating new solutions.

Whether you outsource the entire process to a reliable service provider or hire full-stack developers experienced in similar projects externally, you get:

• Assured code quality and consistency with structured collaboration
• Reduced technical debt accumulation through continuous refactoring and modular development
• Lower risk of burnout with distributed workloads
• Faster development cycles without compromising maintainability

This approach may initially be a considerable investment. However, it’s significantly more sustainable over the long term. Better oversight, thorough code reviews & audits, and proactive technical debt management will position you to build scalable and high-performing applications.

Final Thoughts

With rapid technological advancements, technical debt has been rising, and so has spending on remediation. However, as Accenture suggests, there’s a limit beyond which any additional investments in technical debt mitigation yield diminishing returns and can strain overall tech budgets. The key is to categorize your debt, identify its source, and prioritize what truly needs attention. In this write-up, we have explored how a full-stack approach can help you manage and optimize technical