How Much Tech Debt is OK?
2025-02-17 —
Michael Haupt
How much tech debt is OK? The question of when to refactor, what to refactor, how big to refactor just keeps coming up. Of course everyone wants and likes tidy code, and that ugly piece of tech debt sitting there right in the midst of it is just icky. So let’s remove it … or should we?
This article has some interesting answers, and I appreciate its pragmatism: if it’s not broken, don’t fix it; and have a measurement for the level of brokenness, as well as a threshold that pushes an artifact to “too much debt land”. Instead of attempting to fix all tech debt, the question should be “can we sustain our debt?”
Tags: work