At work, our approach is to create a specific Jira ticket identifying a change we acknowledge "should" be made in the future as a result of a decision we are making today. That way, anything we consider "technical debt" is visible in the backlog. Sometimes those tickets are created by the developer as they take a conscious shortcut, sometimes they are created as a result of pull request reviews, sometimes they just come out of team discussions. The key point is that all such acknowledgements are actionable and treated as "future work" along with everything else.
We may, at some future date, review such tickets and decide "not worth doing" but that still makes us consider the tradeoff we made more closely and we are then making a conscious decision that "this technical debt is acceptable and we're prepared to just write it off" rather than "pay it down".
At work, our approach is to create a specific Jira ticket identifying a change we acknowledge "should" be made in the future as a result of a decision we are making today. That way, anything we consider "technical debt" is visible in the backlog. Sometimes those tickets are created by the developer as they take a conscious shortcut, sometimes they are created as a result of pull request reviews, sometimes they just come out of team discussions. The key point is that all such acknowledgements are actionable and treated as "future work" along with everything else.
We may, at some future date, review such tickets and decide "not worth doing" but that still makes us consider the tradeoff we made more closely and we are then making a conscious decision that "this technical debt is acceptable and we're prepared to just write it off" rather than "pay it down".
Great article with good insights. I'm surprised how I can relate to this article. It is almost as we were working for the same company.