💰 Technical Debt Management
Tracking, prioritizing, and paying down technical debt.
What is technical debt?
Shortcuts, workarounds, and deferred improvements that make future changes harder. Like financial debt, it accumulates interest over time.
Types of tech debt
| Type | Example | Origin |
|---|---|---|
| Deliberate | "We'll skip tests to hit the deadline" | Time pressure |
| Accidental | Poor design discovered later | Lack of knowledge |
| Bit rot | Dependencies outdated, patterns obsolete | Time passing |
| Environmental | Framework deprecated, language version old | Ecosystem changes |
Impact of unmanaged debt
- Slower feature development
- More bugs and regressions
- Harder onboarding for new developers
- Developer frustration and turnover
- Increased incident rate
Tracking tech debt
Create tickets with:
- Description: What's the problem?
- Impact: How does it slow us down?
- Cost to fix: Rough estimate
- Cost of not fixing: What happens if we ignore it?
- Priority: Critical / High / Medium / Low
Paying it down
- Allocate 15-20% of sprint capacity to tech debt
- Fix debt adjacent to current work — don't refactor unrelated code
- Tackle high-impact, low-effort items first
- Include tech debt fixes in feature PRs when they overlap
- Never rewrite from scratch unless absolutely necessary
Prevention
- Code reviews that flag shortcuts
- Definition of Done includes quality standards
- Automated linting and formatting
- Dependency update automation (Renovate/Dependabot)
- Regular architecture reviews