> Carving out time to pay down tech debt requires buy-in from leadership.
Not in my experience! I think one can do pretty well a) refusing to put debt in to begin with, and b) for any new work, including necessary cleanup of what you'll be touching in the estimates.
Some years back I had an explicit understanding with a product manager: the engineers would track tech debt and take care of it in small slices over time. He could always ask for details, but absent his curiosity, we'd just leave him out of it, doing a little bit every week so that things always stayed in good enough shape that we would keep our velocity high and our surprises low. Early on he asked a couple of times, but he quickly realized that to him it was entirely boring.
I think it's a mistake to ask non-experts to prioritize things they don't understand. You're not going to ask your execs if it's ok for you to take time to eat or brush your teeth. You equally shouldn't ask them if it's ok to be a responsible professional and do things like writing tests and keeping the code base reasonably clean. That should just be part of the deal; any exceptions should be temporary and carefully negotiated.
> Carving out time to pay down tech debt requires buy-in from leadership.
Not in my experience! I think one can do pretty well a) refusing to put debt in to begin with, and b) for any new work, including necessary cleanup of what you'll be touching in the estimates.
Some years back I had an explicit understanding with a product manager: the engineers would track tech debt and take care of it in small slices over time. He could always ask for details, but absent his curiosity, we'd just leave him out of it, doing a little bit every week so that things always stayed in good enough shape that we would keep our velocity high and our surprises low. Early on he asked a couple of times, but he quickly realized that to him it was entirely boring.
I think it's a mistake to ask non-experts to prioritize things they don't understand. You're not going to ask your execs if it's ok for you to take time to eat or brush your teeth. You equally shouldn't ask them if it's ok to be a responsible professional and do things like writing tests and keeping the code base reasonably clean. That should just be part of the deal; any exceptions should be temporary and carefully negotiated.