HOW GOOGLE MEASURES AND MANAGES TECH DEBT

Summary from the TLDR Web Dev newsletter

Over the past several years, Google has made a deliberate effort to better manage technical debt. A team at Google interviewed subject matter experts at the company, asking about the underlying causes of the technical debt they encountered as well as what mitigations would be appropriate to fix the debt. They identified 10 categories of technical debt, from incomplete or poor documentation to unstable dependencies. The team then came up with metrics to measure technical debt and brought it down through solutions like better tooling and management frameworks. As a result, Google was able to have better developer productivity.