Technical Debt Financing is a mental model for defining and prioritizing technical debt conceived by Jack Danger1,2.
Evaluation Criteria
| Definition | Modeling | |
|---|---|---|
| Principal | What does it take to fully pay it off? | LoE estimate from Engineers |
| Interest | How much energy is lost tolerating it? | Estimates on time wasted |
| Increase in Principal | How does the payoff increase in the future? | Scale dimensions |
| Increase in Interest | How much energy will lose in the future? | Scale Dimensions |
| Payoff Events | What forcing events require the full pay off? | Known future events |
For scale dimension estimates you can approximate change by looking at the dimensions that exacerbate the issue. For example a problem may become worse as the number of engineers and the number of features scale.
Dimensions that modeling scale changes
- User Traffic
- Data Storage
- Feature Complexity
- Data Modeling Complexity
- Number of Employees at the company
- Number of Engineers
- Number of Users
- Each pasing day
1. Danger, J. Executive Engineering: Practical Engineering Theory for Software Leaders. (The Technical Executive, 2024).
2. Danger. Technical Debt Financing. https://jackdanger.com/technical-debt-financing/ (2024).