Video · About 40 minutes

Prioritizing Technical Debt as if Time and Money Matters

Adam Tornhill · GOTO Conferences (YouTube) Free Intermediate

The honest answer to "how much should we care" is: care about the mess that is actually in your way, and ignore the rest. Tornhill makes this concrete. Most of a codebase is code you rarely touch, so its messiness costs you almost nothing. The debt worth paying down lives in the few files you keep editing. For a two-person team with no time to spare, that is the whole game: fix the hotspots you keep tripping over, leave the quiet corners alone.

• A messy file you never touch is not really costing you. Prioritize debt by where your code actually changes most, not by where it looks worst.
• Trying to clean up everything is a trap for a small team. Target the overlap of complex and frequently changed code, that is where cleanup pays for itself.
• Framing tech debt in terms of the time and money it costs you makes it a business decision you can defend, not a purity project.