Best for
- Teams that discuss debt every retro and pay none of it
- Making the business case for refactoring in money and velocity
- Deciding which mess matters and which can rot in peace
What you give it
- The codebase, its history, and where delivery currently hurts
- The roadmap, so debt is ranked against where work will actually happen
What you get back
- A debt register: each item with location, kind, and the harm it does today
- Interest estimates: what each debt costs monthly in slowdown, bugs and risk
- A ranked paydown plan woven into the roadmap — plus the explicit 'leave it' list
How it works
- Surveys with evidence: change history (what is slow and bug-prone to touch), complexity hotspots, test blind spots, dependency age, and the places developers detour around.
- Names each debt precisely: what it is, where, what kind — design, test, dependency, knowledge, duplication.
- Estimates interest honestly: the recurring monthly cost in slower changes, escaped bugs and risk exposure.
- Ranks by interest x roadmap collision: expensive debt in code the roadmap will visit outranks cheap debt in a corner nobody enters.
- Writes the plan as roadmap items with before/after measures — and defends the 'leave it' list, because paydown has opportunity cost too.
Example
You: Every estimate doubles when a task touches the billing module. Survey our debt before we plan next quarter.
Result: A register of 23 items. Top three by interest: the billing module's tangled state (touched by 60% of roadmap items — refactor scheduled before them), a test suite blind spot that let four regressions through this quarter, and a two-versions-behind framework blocking a security patch. Also: nine items explicitly marked 'leave it' — stable, isolated, not worth the risk of touching.
Limits — please read
- Interest estimates are structured judgement, not accounting; it shows the evidence behind each.
- The register reflects the code's reality; organisational debt (knowledge silos, process) is noted where visible but owned by you.
- A register unmaintained becomes debt itself — it sets the review rhythm so the register stays alive.