Managing Technical Debt - Jacob Kaplan-Moss

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Author: jacobian.org
Full Title: Managing Technical Debt - Jacob Kaplan-Moss
Category:#articles
Document Tags: Development
Summary: Startups often incur technical debt as they focus on building products and gaining customers quickly. To manage this debt, it’s important to measure it consistently, allocate time for addressing it, and regularly review progress with stakeholders. A long-term, incremental approach is more effective than short bursts of effort solely focused on tech debt.
URL: https://jacobian.org/2023/dec/20/tech-debt/

Startups – particularly ones that are bootstrapped or self-funded – don’t often have the luxury to produce tight, well-architected, carefully tested and documented code. And I think that’s fine! Traction is everything; small startups should be prioritizing landing customers and growing their product. A perfect codebase but no customers kills the company, but sustainable income pays for the time to clean up a crufty codebase. (View Highlight)
Use your issue tracker. If your organization has good discipline around using an issue tracker (e.g. GitHub Issues, Jira, etc.) to track work, you can lean on that. Create a “tech debt” label, apply it to any tickets related to reducing or cleaning up tech debt, and use those tickets to measure debt. You can simply use raw ticket counts, or if you do any sort of estimation you can aggregate estimates. You can now track the rough amount of tech debt in your backlog, and monitor as it goes up or down over time. (View Highlight)
Next, agree to a fraction of time your engineering team will spend on technical debt. This could be per sprint, per quarter, whatever – just a allocation of time to be spent decreasing tech debt. (View Highlight)

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