The Definitive Guide to Technical Debt 🦠
How to prevent it, measure it, and eventually pay it back. Backed by deep research and tens of stories from the community.
Refactoring has ~75K subscribers today, who include people with very different jobs: engineers, managers, CTOs, founders, and more.
Whenever I write an article, it is naturally more or less interesting to subsets of these people. When I wrote about the tech talent landscape, it especially resonated with those into hiring. When I wrote The Startup Healthcheck, it was especially useful to founders.
But there are also… exceptions: topics that everybody understands and have lived through in a way or another.
The mother of all these topics is technical debt 🦠
I have written twice about it: on the first time, it was to define it, while on the second one it was to keep it under control.
Both articles are more than two years old now. In the meantime, I have learned a lot by speaking with hundreds of managers and engineers — through the newsletter, and especially through the community, which grew from 50 to more than 750 members.
So, today I am publishing a full, thorough guide on how to handle technical debt: how to prevent it, measure it, and ultimately pay it back.
I write one of such Guides every month — this will be the April one. Guides are longer, more in-depth and more researched articles than usual, that act as primers on a given topic.
This guide will also be extremely practical. I want you to leave this article thinking: “ok, now I can do this and that”.
So, here is our agenda for today:
📖 What is Technical Debt — definitions first, to get everybody on the same page.
⚖️ Good vs Bad Debt? — is there even such a thing like good debt?
🔭 How to Prevent Debt — daily practices to keep code clean and simple
💸 How to Repay Debt — what to do when the crap is already there.
📏 How to Measure Debt — how to know how bad things are, and how better they could be.
📣 How to Advocate for Debt — how to convincingly tell others, especially non-engineers.
💬 Community thread — giant thread with 25+ replies about real stories of how tech leaders in the Refactoring community handle tech debt.
Let’s dive in!