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Paying down tech debt

Published September 12, 2024

  • Paying down tech debt

    by Gergely Orosz and Lou Franco:

    Q: “I’d like to make a better case for paying down tech debt on my team. What are some proven approaches for this?” The tension in finding the right balance between shipping features and paying down accumulated tech debt is as old as software engineering. There’s no one answer on how best to reduce tech debt, and opinion is divided about whether zero tech debt is even a good thing to aim for. But approaches for doing it exist which work well for most teams. To tackle this eternal topic, I turned to industry veteran Lou Franco, who’s been in the software business for over 30 years as an engineer, EM, and executive. He’s also worked at four startups and the companies that later acquired them; most recently Atlassian as a Principal Engineer on the Trello iOS app.
    Apparently Lou has a book on the topic imminent.

    (tags: programming refactoring coding technical-debt tech-debt lou-franco software)