Every engineering organisation accumulates technical debt. The difference between high-performing teams and struggling ones isn't the absence of debt - it's the discipline to measure, prioritise, and systematically reduce it without sacrificing feature delivery. Here's the playbook we use with our enterprise clients.
The Four Types of Technical Debt
Highest risk. Fix immediately.
Acceptable if tracked and planned.
Training & code review gap.
Natural learning. Refactor as you go.
Measuring Technical Debt
You can't manage what you can't measure. We track technical debt across five dimensions:
Story points / sprint
Bugs per release
Commit to deploy
Mean time to recover
Hours per feature
The Debt-to-Feature Ratio
The most powerful metric is the percentage of sprint capacity allocated to debt reduction. Industry benchmarks:
- Healthy: 15-20% of sprint capacity on tech debt and platform work
- Warning: Less than 10% - debt is accumulating faster than you're paying it down
- Crisis: 0% - all feature delivery, no maintenance. Velocity collapse is 6-12 months away
The Prioritisation Framework
Impact vs Effort Matrix
Plot every debt item on a 2x2 matrix. High-impact, low-effort items (quick wins) go first. High-impact, high-effort items become planned projects. Low-impact items go into a backlog and are addressed opportunistically when engineers are already in that area of the code.
Cost of Delay
Quantify the ongoing cost of each debt item: developer hours wasted per sprint, customer-facing incidents caused, onboarding time added for new hires. When you can say "this tech debt costs us 40 hours per month", it becomes easy to justify the refactoring investment.
Strategic Alignment
Prioritise debt reduction that aligns with upcoming features. If next quarter's roadmap requires heavy changes to the payment system, address payment-related tech debt now. This way, debt reduction directly accelerates feature delivery.
Governance: Making It Stick
- Tech Debt Registry - A shared, visible backlog (not hidden in Jira subtasks). Every engineer can add items, and the registry is reviewed monthly by the tech lead.
- Definition of Done - No PR merges without adequate test coverage. No new code in deprecated modules. No copy-paste duplication.
- Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) - Document every significant architectural decision, including the debt trade-offs made. Future engineers will thank you.
- Quarterly Tech Debt Reviews - CTO-level visibility. Review the top 10 debt items, their cost of delay, and the plan to address them.
Cultural Shifts
"Just ship it"
"Tech debt is an engineering problem"
"We can't afford to refactor"
"What's the cost of delay?"
"Tech debt is a business risk"
"We can't afford not to refactor"
"Technical debt is like financial debt - a small amount at low interest can be strategic. But unmanaged, compounding debt will bankrupt your engineering velocity."
Need help managing your tech debt?
Our engineering consultants help CTOs build sustainable debt reduction programmes.
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