In our job, technical debt is probably the most frustrating, draining and tenacious thing we have to fight against. Of course, there are best practices: refactor, aim for simplicity with KISS, avoid over-engineering with YAGNI in order to keep this debt as low as possible. And yet, we never really manage to get rid of it. Worse, it keeps piling up even when we apply those principles, as if it were inevitable.

But what if those very best practices sometimes made the problem worse instead of solving it? Technical debt may be only the visible part of something deeper: accidental design debt. A far more complex problem that leads to spaghetti software and microservices that are really just a distributed monolith, and that we often create ourselves without even realizing it.

In this talk, we will explore the mechanisms of design debt and its impact on our architecture, our processes, our organization, and even our business. Through concrete examples, we will see how to detect it, assess how deep it goes, and act before it becomes entrenched for good.