Technical Debt Intelligence

My first big rewrite cost $400K and failed. The next three modernizations succeeded using a 6-phase strangler fig roadmap. Here's the complete playbook with real budget numbers.

I watched a 45-person team lose 62% of their velocity in 18 months. The death spiral has 4 stages and a specific breakout protocol: Stabilize-Demonstrate-Invest.

Netflix uses chaos engineering to find debt. Google uses large-scale changes to fix it. Stripe budgets for it explicitly. Here's what you can steal from each approach.

I replaced 183 Jira debt tickets with a 14-item Technical Debt Register and resolved 6 items in one quarter. Here's exactly what to track and what to skip.

I lost 3 senior engineers in 5 months to codebase frustration. That's $225K in replacement costs. Here's the KEEP framework for breaking the debt-turnover spiral.

Five of my 11 debt sprints failed. The difference was structure. The 4B Framework (Baseline, Bet, Build, Benchmark) turns debt sprints into measurable wins.

Microservices don't reduce technical debt, they redistribute it from code complexity to operational complexity. Here are the 5 categories of distributed debt and a scoring framework.

An 8-factor scoring framework for the refactor-vs-rewrite decision, with a contrarian take on why most rewrites fail and when to do one anyway.

Eight tools deployed, most failed. The five patterns that kill debt tracking initiatives, and the simple system that actually works: a spreadsheet and a meeting.

A step-by-step calculator for quantifying technical debt in dollars across four cost categories, with data-gathering templates and presentation tips.

How to use git log and complexity analysis to find the 14 files (out of 2,400) causing 73% of your bugs, and a triage checklist for fixing them.

AI coding assistants double your output and 6x your debt rate. Here's a five-rule framework for capturing speed without drowning in debt.

A practical four-quadrant prioritization framework for technical debt that tells you exactly what to fix now, what to plan, and what to ignore.

Technical debt isn't a failure state. It's a financial instrument. Here's a framework for making deliberate debt decisions with documented contracts.

A battle-tested playbook for pitching technical debt remediation to leadership, with frameworks for calculating ROI and handling objections.

Seven technical debt metrics with specific action triggers that actually change engineering behavior, not just decorate dashboards.