I might be doing it wrong but I constantly pay down technical debt to almost zero. The reason I do this is because when I am working on an area of system it takes alot of thinking to understand it, thus I try to get as much done as possible in that context, because re-learning the context later is very expensive in terms of time.
I'm pretty certain that means new features are implemented alot more easily. Hard to quantify though.
I can say I'm always thanking "yesterday me" for finishing the job and cleaning up whatever "today me" is working on.
It's possible for me to do this because I do most of my programming on my own. I don't think this approach is suitable for most software engineering processes because they tend to deprioritise technical debt.
I'm pretty certain that means new features are implemented alot more easily. Hard to quantify though.
I can say I'm always thanking "yesterday me" for finishing the job and cleaning up whatever "today me" is working on.
It's possible for me to do this because I do most of my programming on my own. I don't think this approach is suitable for most software engineering processes because they tend to deprioritise technical debt.