Strategies for Addressing Tech Debt

One heuristic for addressing tech debt is when costs accelerate non-linearly, do not delay fixes for efficiency¹.

Jack Danger Canty’s technical debt financing is a coherent model for addressing tech debt².

Anti-patterns anti-patterns

From Executive Engineering³:

1. X% of time devoted to tech-debt: this will fail because the number is likely arbitrary and doesn’t account for what the actual rate of accumulation v. pay down
2. A technical debt team: this will fail because the incentives of the other teams are completely misaligned, and there will be inevitable conflicts between them and this team.
3. Local prioritization, allowing teams or engineers to address what they think should be fixed. This will fail because there isn’t any way to assess whether that work is valuable vs. the range of other work (other tech debt, feature work, etc.)

1. Kerr, J. When costs are nonlinear, keep it small. https://jessitron.com/2021/01/18/when-costs-are-nonlinear-keep-it-small/ (2021).

2. Danger. Technical Debt Financing. https://jackdanger.com/technical-debt-financing/ (2024).

3. Danger, J. Executive Engineering: Practical Engineering Theory for Software Leaders. (The Technical Executive, 2024).