The 4-Step Technical Debt Time Bomb Fix

Introduction

According to a 2024 study by Stripe, developers spend an average of 42% of their time dealing with technical debt and maintenance instead of building new features. Almost half their time. Just keeping the lights on.

But here’s what makes technical debt so dangerous: it creates a death spiral.

You’re under pressure to deliver fast. So you cut corners. You skip writing tests. You copy-paste code instead of refactoring. You build a quick fix instead of the right solution. “We’ll clean it up later,” everyone says.

Later never comes.

This is our fourth and final lecture in our Agile Transformation series. To make sure you’re all caught up, you can find the previous lectures linked below:

Lecture 1: Why 84% of Companies Are Still Faking Agile (And What Actually Works)

Lecture 2: Making Agile Work With a Distributed Team

Lecture 3: The Product Owner Bottleneck – Why One Person Can’t Do It All

Now, let’s dive into our final topic.

Next sprint, you’re under even more pressure because you’re moving more slowly. Why? Because that messy code from last sprint is slowing you down. So you cut more corners. More shortcuts. More “temporary” solutions.

The code gets messier. Delivery gets slower. Pressure increases. More corners get cut.

Round and round it goes.

A study by the Consortium for Information & Software Quality found that technical debt costs U.S. companies $1.52 trillion annually in productivity loss. That’s a trillion with a T.

In government, this problem is brutal. We’re often working with systems that are 10, 15, sometimes 20 years old. Legacy code that nobody fully understands anymore. And we can’t just throw it away and start over. Citizens depend on these systems every single day.

My Failed Solution (And What It Taught Me)

I’d like to share my experience following the recent system outage. I was determined to address the underlying technical debt, so I proceeded with what seemed to be the most logical course of action.

I scheduled a “tech debt sprint.”

We’d pause all feature work for one entire sprint. Two weeks. The team would do nothing but clean up code, write tests, and fix the mess. We’d knock out all the debt in one shot. Then we’d go back to normal development, but with a clean codebase.

Leadership hated the idea. “We’re pausing delivery for two weeks? What do we tell our stakeholders?”

I convinced them anyway. We needed this. The team needed breathing room.

The tech debt sprint started. Developers were excited at first. Finally, time to fix things properly. They dove into the code.

But something weird happened. By day three, the enthusiasm was gone. The team was overwhelmed. They’d open one file to fix something and find five more problems. It was like pulling a thread on a sweater. Everything unraveled.

By the end of the sprint, they’d fixed maybe 15% of what they’d identified. And they were exhausted. Burned out from two straight weeks of grunt work with nothing to show for it.

Worse, when we went back to feature development, we immediately started accumulating debt again. Because nothing in our process had changed. We were still under the same pressure. Still making the same shortcuts.

Six months later, we were right back where we started. Maybe worse.

That was my AHA moment.

The Real Solution: Make Debt Part of the Job

I was sitting with one of our developers, looking at the mess. “What if we stopped treating technical debt like this special thing we deal with separately?” she said. “What if we just… paid it down a little bit every single sprint?”

That simple question changed everything.

Here’s what we did. And I’m telling you, this approach saved our codebase and our sanity.

Step 1: Make the Debt Visible

Technical debt is invisible to most people. Leadership can’t see it. Stakeholders don’t understand it. Even Product Owners often miss it.

We started tracking it like any other work. Every time a developer identified technical debt, they created a backlog item for it. They described it in plain language: “The user authentication code is fragile. When we add new features, it breaks. Fixing this will take 8 hours but will make future development 3x faster.”

We categorized debt into three buckets:

• Critical: This will cause outages or security problems. Fix immediately.
• High: This is slowing us down significantly. Fix soon.
• Medium: This is messy but manageable. Fix when convenient.

Suddenly, technical debt was visible. The Product Owner could see it. Leadership could see it. It wasn’t a mysterious “tech thing” anymore. It was tracked work with business impact.

Step 2: The 20% Rule

This was the game-changer.

Every sprint, we reserved 20% of our capacity for technical debt. Not “if we have time.” Not “when we’re done with features.” Twenty percent. Period.

For a two-week sprint with a team of eight developers, that’s roughly 64 hours. Every sprint, we spent 64 hours paying down debt.

At first, leadership pushed back hard. “We’re slowing down delivery by 20%!”

I showed them the data. “We’re currently spending 45% of our time fighting with bad code. This will reduce that to 25% within six months. We’ll actually deliver more, not less.”

They were skeptical. But they let us try it.

Step 3: Make It Non-Negotiable

Here’s where most teams fail. They say they’ll spend 20% on debt, but when pressure hits, they drop it. “Just this sprint, we’ll skip it. We need to ship this feature.”

One skip becomes two. Two becomes five. Before you know it, you’re back to zero time on debt.

We made it non-negotiable. The 20% was built into our sprint planning. It was part of our Definition of Done. If we were planning 100 story points of work, only 80 could be features. Twenty had to be debt reduction.

The Scrum Master enforced it. The Product Owner supported it. Even when stakeholders complained.

Step 4: Show the Impact

Every sprint review, we demonstrated two things: the new features we built, and the debt we paid down.

For the debt work, we explained the impact in business terms. “We refactored the search function. Before, adding new search filters took 3 days. Now it takes 4 hours. That means faster delivery of citizen-requested features.”

Leadership started seeing technical debt paydown as valuable work, not wasted time.

What Actually Happened

After six months of the 20% rule, something remarkable happened.

Our velocity went up. Not down. Up. By 28%.

Why? Because the code was cleaner. Adding features was faster. Bugs were fewer. The team wasn’t constantly fighting with the codebase.

Developer satisfaction scores went from 5.2 to 8.1. People enjoyed coming to work again. They weren’t drowning in mess.

And here’s the kicker: we went 11 months without a major production incident. Before, we were averaging one every six weeks.

The cost? Twenty percent of our sprint capacity. The return? Everything else got better.

Connecting the Dots

Think back to what we’ve covered in this series.

In post one, we talked about why 84% of companies are faking Agile. They’re going through the motions without the substance. Technical debt is one of those substances. If you’re not actively managing it, you’re faking it.

In post two, we tackled distributed teams. Technical debt makes remote work even harder. When your code is a mess, developers can’t figure things out independently. They need constant synchronous communication. Clean code enables async work.

In post three, we addressed the Product Owner bottleneck. You know what makes a PO’s job harder? A codebase so fragile that every small change takes forever. When you pay down debt, you free up the PO because the team can move faster.

Everything connects. Foundation, people, process, and technical excellence. Skip any piece, and the whole thing falls apart.

Your Turn

Technical debt doesn’t disappear on its own. It compounds like financial debt. Except worse, because it slows down everything you’re trying to do.

You can’t fix it with one big effort. We tried. It doesn’t work.

You fix it by making it visible, reserving capacity for it every sprint, and treating it like the serious business problem it is.

Twenty percent of your sprint might feel like a lot. But 45% of your time wasted fighting with bad code is way more.

Start small if you need to. Reserve 10% this quarter. Increase to 15% next quarter. Build up to 20%. But start. Today.

Your future self will thank you. Your team will thank you. And your system won’t crash on a Tuesday afternoon in the middle of tax season.

This wraps up our four-part series on making Agile actually work in 2026. We’ve covered the foundation, the distributed challenge, the Product Owner problem, and the technical debt trap. These aren’t theoretical problems. They’re real issues that kill real transformations every day.

But they’re also solvable. With honesty, discipline, and the right approach, you can build something that actually works. Not Agile theater. Real agility. The kind that delivers value and keeps your team sane.

Now go fix your technical debt. Your code is waiting.

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