Servicing the Technical Debt

The last activity in managing technical debt is to service or repay the debt. When discussing debt servicing, I find it helpful to use the following status categories:

• Happened-upon technical debt—debt that the development team was unaware existed until it was exposed during the normal course of performing work on the product. For example, the team is adding a new feature to the product and in doing so it realizes that a work-around had been built into the code years before by someone who has long since departed.

• Known technical debt—debt that is known to the development team and has been made visible using one of the previously discussed approaches.

• Targeted technical debt—debt that is known and has been targeted for servicing by the development team.