Technical debt: what to get right first

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. If you only fix one thing about technical debt this quarter, make it the first item below.

The question is rarely whether something can be built, but what it costs to keep running afterwards. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

Start here

Some debt is a deliberate trade, some is just neglect. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Then this

Track it in writing or it becomes invisible. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Eventually

Paying a little down each cycle beats a rewrite. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

What this looks like day to day

Code gets read far more often than it gets written, and usually by someone with less context than the author had. Three things worth confirming about technical debt before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Track it in writing or it becomes invisible — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.