Counting the Cost of Bad Code

A recent Wall Street Journal Tech Blog post takes a look at the hard costs of technical debt and shows that "I.T. Debt" is a growing concern:

It remains to be seen how efforts to affix a certain cost to technical debt can be used to provide a clear guide to business risks. But businesses are starting to pay more attention to the issue....technical debt [is] being raised as a due diligence issue in mergers and acquisitions, and increasing awareness of it is influencing software development practices.