How to manage and reduce technical debt
Balance speed of delivery with code quality, systematically paying down accumulated technical debt before it slows innovation.
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0 of 7 steps completedStep-by-Step Instructions
1 Step 1: Define what technical debt means for your team
Step 1: Define what technical debt means for your team
Technical debt includes: legacy code without tests, outdated dependencies, hacky workarounds, missing documentation, architectural shortcuts. Make debt visible and shared understanding across engineering and product. Not all debt is bad—some is strategic trade-off for speed.
Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers
Strategies for managing and improving existing codebases
2 Step 2: Create a technical debt backlog and prioritize by impact
Step 2: Create a technical debt backlog and prioritize by impact
Log debt items like product features: what, why it matters, cost of not fixing. Prioritize by: business impact (does it block new features?), risk (could it cause outages?), team productivity (does it slow development?). Make debt visible to product and leadership.
3 Step 3: Allocate dedicated time to debt reduction
Step 3: Allocate dedicated time to debt reduction
Reserve 20% of engineering capacity for technical health: refactoring, test coverage, upgrades, documentation. Don't let debt work be perpetually de-prioritized for features. Consistent investment prevents debt from becoming unmanageable.
Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse)
Project management with cycle time tracking for tech debt work
4 Step 4: Implement boy scout rule: leave code better than you found it
Step 4: Implement boy scout rule: leave code better than you found it
When touching existing code, make small improvements: add tests, improve naming, extract functions, add comments. Incremental cleanup over time reduces debt without big refactoring projects. Small consistent effort compounds.
Refactoring by Martin Fowler
Catalog of code improvements and incremental refactoring techniques
5 Step 5: Set code quality standards and enforce in code review
Step 5: Set code quality standards and enforce in code review
Establish standards: test coverage requirements, linting rules, documentation expectations. Use automated tools to catch issues early. Code review should block PRs that add unnecessary debt. Prevention is easier than remediation.
6 Step 6: Track technical debt metrics over time
Step 6: Track technical debt metrics over time
Measure: code coverage percentage, number of security vulnerabilities, outdated dependencies, cyclomatic complexity. Track trends: is debt growing or shrinking? Metrics create accountability and show progress on debt reduction efforts.
7 Step 7: Communicate debt impact to non-technical stakeholders
Step 7: Communicate debt impact to non-technical stakeholders
Frame debt in business terms: "This technical debt slows feature development by 30%" or "Fixing this will prevent future outages." Help product and leadership understand why debt work matters. When they see business impact, they support investment.
