Eight Questions to Ask About Your Tech Debt – Intro

NOTE: This is an archive of an e-mail I sent out to my list on 1-September-2025

In Part 3 of my book, Swimming in Tech Debt, I propose a scoring system to help you prioritize and pay down your tech debt. It’s based on what I called the eight dimensions of tech debt:

1.  Visibility: If this debt were paid, how visible would it be outside of engineering? 

2.  Misalignment: If this debt were paid, how much more would our code match our engineering values?

3.  Size: If we knew exactly what to do and there were no coding unknowns at all, how long would the tech debt fix take?

4.  Difficulty: What is the risk that work on the debt takes longer than represented in the Size score because we won’t know how to do it?

5.  Volatility: How likely is the code to need changes in the near future because of new planned features or high-priority bugs?

6.  Resistance: How hard is it to change this code if we don’t pay the debt?

7.  Regression: How bad would it be if we introduced new bugs in this code when we try to fix its tech debt?

8.  Uncertainty: How sure are we that our tech debt fix will deliver the developer productivity benefits we expect?

My starting point for these questions was to first consider the costs and benefits of paying a particular piece of tech debt vs. the costs and benefits of not paying it (i.e. staying with it). The Stay Costs and Pay Benefits drive us to pay the debt (Pay Forces). The Stay Benefits and Pay Costs drive us to not pay (Stay Forces).

In the book, I show this diagram to explain how they work to help you decide what to do:

A diagram of the Pay Forces in an arrow pointing right and the Stay Forces in an arrow pointing left.

Generally, if the pay forces are higher than the stay forces, then you should lean towards paying the debt. If the stay forces are higher, you might be better off ignoring it. Or, if you don’t want to ignore debt with high stay forces, then I recommend targeting the sub-dimension that is driving that force.

In the book, I ask you to score each dimension and add up the scores to determine the net force. I also show how the specific combination of forces gives an indication of the type of project you should do.

See the book’s accompanying spreadsheet to see an example of how I do it:

https://loufranco.com/tech-debt-book/tech-debt-resources​

Next: #1 Visibility