Technical debt is well-documented on the internet. You may be discussing it in terms of code enhancing or refactoring, or it may simply be a few items on a lengthy to-do list. Going further, I will share with you some real-world experiences I had with technical debt and give you my 10 rules on controlling and avoiding it.

1. Use it to your advantage

Technical debt, like financial debt, becomes a problem if ignored or treated as nonexistent. Instead, accept and maintain it as a tool.

First, understand that technical debt is healthy. Spending time on technical debt might mean you're not helping clients solve new challenges.

Good debt vs. poor debt: The objective is to balance important trade-offs to maximize customer value while minimizing debt. This style of assessment might vary within the same organization.

2. Add it to your culture

Our company's culture includes a collaborative code review for tech debt. This helps knowledge spread throughout the organization and prevents repeating errors with future improvements and products.

We've established a thorough definition of the "done" cycle, where even if you make technical concessions along the road, they're noted instantly so the product or feature isn't DONE until we've addressed them, even if that means we are eternally in the beta phase.

Infrastructure is another good way. If the cost of making it solid infrastructure as part of the platform, for upcoming services and additions, is not too expensive, we will do so.

3. Documentation rules

Losing a competent IT team's skills may be quite devastating to a corporation. Solid documentation helps eliminate and prevent technological debt. Training our technicians to capture every piece of a ticket and any abnormalities and configuration information they find in an environment before moving on gives our technical leaders a better sense of the condition of our client environments and what the problem may be when anything goes wrong.

Better documentation and cleaner surroundings enable IT to accomplish more with less labor, both reactively to address problems and proactively to grow the company.

4. Employ and listen to the Product Owner

A Product Owner can help you stop new Technical Debt from happening. Features that users or customers don't use shouldn't be kept at the same level of quality as the rest of the product, remove their code before it can build up technical debt. One of my teams recently found a feature that neither our past customers nor the current ones use. Worse, there were no automatic checks to match. Not only did it cause problems during the coding process, but it also took a lot of time to manually check for regressions.

5. Organizations should prioritize technical debt

Not being a gatekeeper or control freak should help. We should never become connected to code. Organizations value culture. Too many developers work at places where there's never enough time to do it well, so we'll do it again. Attitude is key. Developers are autonomous and don't like rigorous code reviews, pair programming, etc., yet they may avoid technical debt.

Technical debt slows performance. Eliminating it speeds up and improves code. Personal reward is another perk. Once my open-source initiatives take off, additional contributors join. My code is often rewritten and optimized better than I could have anticipated before it becomes spaghetti code or technical debt.