Tech Debt Management

Technical debt is a loan against your future velocity. Track it, price it, and pay it down strategically.

Context

Every codebase accumulates technical debt -- shortcuts taken, technologies that aged, architectures that evolved beyond their original design. The problem isn't debt itself (it's sometimes a rational trade-off), but unmanaged debt that silently drains velocity and increases risk.

In a lifecycle-aware system, technical debt should be grounded in evidence. Do not dump every annoyance into a debt bucket. Focus on structural issues that repeatedly show up in reviews, incidents, slow delivery, or brittle coexistence boundaries.

Inputs

• review-report -- produced by the preceding skill in the lifecycle
• retrospective-report -- produced by the preceding skill in the lifecycle
• postmortem-report -- produced by the preceding skill in the lifecycle

Process

Step 1: Identify Debt from Repeated Evidence