10% is under investing and this is a bad methodology. How do you know what to work on? Is tech debt just the stuff that annoys you or is it actually bad? What

10% is under investing and this is a bad methodology. How do you know what to work on? Is tech debt just the stuff that annoys you or is it actually bad? What you need to tackle tech debt is a quality program with metrics. I’m talking code coverage, cyclomatic complexity checking, linters and scanners, DORA, SAST, DAST, etc. Quantify your quality. Then quantify the risks and costs of not improving it. Then you need to target the areas of code your tools tell you to and you need to make a conscious effort to solve those very specific things. “Module A’s complexity score is 26. Our standards say this needs to be 10. Therefore this is considered a quality item. Therefore it goes into the sprint as a strategic investment.” Software and business leaders, when developers talk about tech debt… they are talking about managing complexity. (Shit breaking all the time because you don’t have tests in a complex system. It’s failing because of the complexity.) High complexity is expensive. If you do not balance the need to manage complexity against features and you do not act intentionally about your quality your software will eventually fail or if you’re lucky it will just reach a stage where you can’t maintain it anymore and you’ll scrap and rebuild. Investing in quality makes you go zoom.