How to manage technical debt steadily without stopping feature delivery

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Technical debt is a natural part of software development and should be treated as a manageable trade-off rather than a sign of poor engineering, according to a post published on the Doktouri Agency blog via DEV Community. The article argues that the real problem is not incurring debt but allowing it to remain invisible and untracked, often existing only as unspoken concern among senior engineers. To make debt manageable, teams are advised to log known issues as tickets, use consistent code comments, and monitor signals like rising bug rates or repeated failures in the same module. Rather than halting delivery for dedicated refactoring sprints, the piece recommends allocating 15–20% of each development cycle to debt repayment and applying incremental clean-up whenever code is already being modified. Communicating debt in business terms — such as its impact on delivery speed and system reliability — is also highlighted as key to gaining stakeholder support for addressing it.

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