Technical debt occurs when best practices are ignored as IT solutions are built. In a survey of 500+ IT pros conducted by CompTIA, approximately three-quarters said technical debt is a challenge at their organizations, with 42% calling it a significant obstacle. Although it’s a widespread problem, this doesn’t make it any more palatable or less threatening to a company’s health.
Technical debt is often caused by suboptimal technical leadership, leading to a flawed developer experience (DX). When forced to work with shaky architecture, outdated tools, and ineffective workflows, developer productivity, camaraderie, and culture suffer. This is why organizations need to prioritize technical debt remediation, emphasizing friendlier developer environments and more efficient workflows. The goal is to optimize the DX and provide tooling driven by artificial intelligence (AI), which benefits the developer and the company’s bottom line.
DX for less stress
Keeping this approach on track ensures your software and development teams have a DX champion. Smaller entities often lack this leader, but you can bet large, successful enterprises have one. They’ll follow a new developer as they create an environment, roll up their sleeves, and help if needed.
This is the attentive, hands-on hallmark of an effective DX champion, and they’re especially crucial during onboarding, which can be a particularly stressful time for a new developer. It could take weeks for them to contribute, and once they do provide a patch or minor feature, troubles can follow.
For instance, a continuous integration (CI) service could stop responding. The knee-jerk reaction is to blame this on something the newbie did, but in reality, it could be the product of a poorly written, flaky test. This can be a morale buster for someone who has just joined your organization and is accustomed to newer tools. Tooling is available to improve situations like CircleCI, which possesses features that’ll pinpoint a test suite’s flakiness. Still, it starts with a DX champion, one who has the foresight to pause activities after every sprint to ensure code is maintained and leveraged again in the future.
Ideally, the DX champion should be a senior engineer manager, platform engineer, or senior technical architect. To ensure it takes, provide them with enough time in every sprint and a fairly new but established staff developer who can give fresh feedback and insight into onboarding shortfalls.
Taking the pulse
There are ways to take the pulse of your team and unearth morale issues. DX champions can conduct regular surveys to ascertain if a developer enjoys working on a project. These surveys can go deep into specifics, such as the aforementioned CI process. And, of course, remember that people often vote with their feet. So, if people request to leave specific projects—or the company itself—it’s a good indicator that they’re unhappy or feel they’re not being taken seriously enough.
Some metrics can capture the impact of technical debt on teams quite effectively. For example, Mean Time to Fix, a concept borrowed from the DORA metric Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR), measures the average service‑restoration time after an incident—how long it takes from detection to resolution. A simple but impactful way to apply this in practice is to track how long it takes to resolve issues: perhaps a minor patch took three days to correct and deploy, when ideally your team should turn it around in half a day. You can pair this with tracking the time invested in technical debt remediation and developer experience improvements versus time spent shipping features per sprint. Together, those metrics reveal the hidden drag on velocity and help benchmark improvement as you reduce incidents and accelerate recovery over time.
The human factor
AI tooling can make engineers and developers more productive, which is critical because technical debt can slow things down. If you’re using a solution like GitHub or Copilot for code changes and submit a pull request, CI will probably require a couple of hours. So, does a developer hop into another task as they wait? Because let’s face it, this requires a context switch, which kills productivity.
Developers want to focus on code, period. Tooling should help get it into production, not be a constant roadblock. AI tooling can dramatically cut time, but it’s up to the teams themselves to distinguish what is workable and what is too complex. To that end:
- To get buy-in, have an honest discussion with your teams about what is an acceptable level of technical debt and code quality.
- Ensure any code included in your main branch meets the acceptable level of technical debt; and
- Make sure all team members understand that exceeding that limit will require fast remediation.
There is a case to be made for deploying AI agents with orchestration provided by engineers. A Capgemini survey of execs at larger enterprises shows more than four out of five are planning to integrate AI agents over the next three years. That said, a report on a bug could show that it’s small enough foran AI agent to clear up. This will save your team time, enabling them to focus on more complex or higher-value work. Even so, there will be trade-offs AI cannot consider, which is why human oversight is always needed.
Debt and goals
Getting your culture in line early is imperative, or you’ll lose money hand over fist fixing bugs, dealing with security, and struggling with compliance. Be aware that there are metrics to show the value of paying off or refactoring technical debt, and this is what speaks to stakeholders. There’s also DORA’s MTTR (mean time to repair) to assess the time it took for a fix. You can even track bug volume; if that rises, you could identify technical debt problems.
The truth is, there will be times when you need to ship quickly. An organization may know that a product lacks scalability or performs poorly over time. A developer might make a mental note to circle back and address these issues when the dust settles. But that rarely happens, and when this becomes standard practice in your culture, technical debt and its interests grow exponentially.
Pay as you grow
Every company can afford a few hours weekly to bolster its DX and reduce technical debt; a DX champion will keep things on track. If this doesn’t happen now, you’ll pay much more later in the form of lackluster performance, slowed development, and security problems. For example, say your team missed upgrades to Ruby on Rails for the past eight years. Then suddenly, project costs go through the roof, caused by a version of Ruby that’s three generations behind, resulting in dependencies that are no longer current and a mountain of useless code.
If upgraded incrementally, this would never have happened. That said, pay and play as you go, and provide ongoing support to engineering and developer teams. This approach will keep technical debt in check, while growing culture, performance, and productivity.
Ernesto Tagwerker is the founder and CTO of OmbuLabs. The company helps Fortune 500 companies uncover hidden opportunities in their data and build AI-powered solutions that drive real impact. From classic ML models to cutting-edge AI systems, from idea to end product, OmbuLabs creates solutions focused on client goals. For more information, please visit https://www.ombulabs.com.
