Code quality: a concern for businesses, bottom lines, and empathetic programmers
The value of high-quality code can be difficult to communicate. Some managers see it as a boondoggle, an expensive hobby for overly fastidious programmers, since investing in code quality can slow development over the short term and doesn’t appear to alter the user experience. But nothing could be further from the truth.
It’s true that tech companies with a poor organizational understanding of code quality can launch quickly and see success in the short term. But in doing so they incur an invisible debt that grows every time the code is altered. This debt does not stay intangible for long. Once the product exceeds a very low threshold of complexity, the debt comes due, gradually consuming the productivity of their development team and the usability of their software. When we speak of “technical debt,” these are the dangers we’re talking about.
Organizations that produce software sit at the intersection of a thousand different variables. Anything that affects the mental state of a programmer, communication within their team, or the incentives attached to their work is likely to be reflected in their code. Promoting code quality, then, is partially a matter of improving organizational health and competence as a whole. In this article I’ll briefly define code quality and explain how it impacts the whole company, then zero in on a few organizational habits that are effective in increasing it.
What is code quality?
In a way, learning to code is learning to empathize with a machine: its intense attention to detail, its need for matched parentheses and consistent capitalization, and the helplessness of its error states. These needs can be so foreign and opaque that the most experienced of us still spend hours, even days, chasing down bugs that amount to just a few characters of source code. This is taxing. Sometimes empathizing with our machines is as much as we can handle. In those situations we fall back on a simple metric: does it do the job? Since the foremost purpose of code is to do a job, there are times when we don’t look beyond that.
This approach isn’t sustainable for any but the smallest of projects, though. Code is not sudoku, with a single correct solution for each problem. There are infinite ways to write any computation task, and some are simpler and more predictable than others. Small differences here add up over time. Code is written once and read a thousand times. Programmers read code when they’re fixing bugs or adding functionality. They read code to remember how their applications work. They read code to discover patterns they can reuse elsewhere. The only thing that’s done to code more often than reading it is executing it. This is the fundamental reason why we concern ourselves with code quality. The usefulness of a piece of code has a great deal to do with its impact on the people who will read it. When we write good code, we’re saving them time and effort. We’re making their jobs easier. We’re making an investment that will pay dividends day after day, year after year, until the application reaches the end of its life.
So, ironically, once we’ve trained our minds to empathize with computers so we can write working code, it’s then our responsibility to remember how to empathize with humans so our code doesn’t frustrate them.
What does code quality look like in mechanical terms? Multiple books have been written on the subject, so I won’t attempt to explain in-depth. But to give an overview, high-quality code is code that can be understood quickly. If a programmer can pick a method or class from a codebase at random and understand it deeply in a few minutes—not just its functionality and business logic, but everything it depends on and every way it might be used—without consulting too many other files, then the codebase is probably high-quality. Once this is achieved, the question of whether the code works correctly is far less concerning; it can be changed, fixed, or deleted without much risk or effort.
Granted, I’m describing a philosophical ideal here. In a real-world application there will always be pieces that are unavoidably complex or confusing. But even these pieces can vary widely in quality. There is no situation where code quality is completely out of the programmer’s hands.
A few of the most important factors in code quality are:
- Encapsulation. High-quality code is most often made up of self-contained components: one cannot change the behavior of a self-contained component by modifying something outside of it, nor does the component modify things that are external to it (within reason—it makes sense for a component to read and update a database if that’s understood to be its job). This saves development time because when a component needs to be fixed, updated, or deleted, programmers spend less time searching for external causes and effects.
- Idiomatic code. Modern programming languages have built-in syntax and methods for the most common tasks, like converting a string to a number or determining if a collection contains a particular element. These are more reliable, performant, and widely understood than anything a programmer might write from scratch, and require far less code than a custom method. Code written idiomatically—that is, using the conventions and built-in features of a language as much as possible—is more readable and requires less maintenance.
- Meaningful names. Variables and methods throughout a codebase are named by the programmers who write them. Meaningless names, like `x` or `fn`, require the programmer to understand and remember extra layers of context while reading code that uses them. If there are more than a few of these in one place it becomes impossible to keep everything in working memory. High-quality code uses specific and descriptive variable names, like `departmentName` or `getAnnualExpenses`. Although it is possible to be too verbose here, a programmer reading code for the first time is better served by a name that says too much than one that says too little.
- Low cyclomatic complexity. Any time a computer makes a decision, as with an if statement or a for loop, another layer of meaning is added to the code that follows: under one condition, the code will be executed or repeated; under another condition, it will be skipped. “Cyclomatic complexity” is a metric referring to the number of decisions that exist in a process. As with the previous point, a programmer’s working memory can become a bottleneck as layers of meaning accumulate. While decisions are essential to the usefulness of an application, high-quality code minimizes decision points and the code they contain, and avoids nesting them within each other as much as possible.
It’s important to note that while code quality includes a few factors that can be measured, every concrete measure of code quality is imperfect and easy to game. There is no product or tool that can automatically and definitively rate the quality of a codebase. However, there are heuristics you can use to get a feel for code quality and see where issues may lie.
Unit tests, for example, are pieces of code that test application behavior. They do so in a fast and repeatable way, ensuring that the application continues to work correctly as it grows and changes. Unit tests are more likely to accompany high-quality code than low-quality code. They reward and encourage quality, since the things that make for good code—encapsulation, loose coupling, conciseness, simplicity, and so on—also make for easier testing. This changes the path of least resistance for programmers: if they’re writing unit tests for previously-untested code, sometimes it will be easier to simplify and rearrange that code than to test it in its current form. And if programmers know they will be writing unit tests as a standard part of the development process, they’re incentivized to write better code in the first place.
The impacts of code quality
The nature of software applications is to grow, not just in size but in complexity. Complexity comes in many forms. Some of them are the result of low-quality code, but others are a fundamental part of the application’s functionality and value. Software complexity has business value for a few reasons:
- The complexity of a problem space can be absorbed by software processes. This complexity is transformed, not destroyed. Software is never less complex than the problem it actually solves (although well-built software hides this fact).
- A product can adapt to an ever-increasing variety of use cases by adding complexity (often during the deployment phase). This creates a larger market for the product by hiding or customizing features based on their relevance to specific industry segments, companies, or users.
- Good software is built to high standards of accessibility, observability, resilience, and visual appeal. All of these things require additional code and therefore increased complexity.
Complexity that adds value or increases competitive advantage is “good complexity.” Good complexity is the reason we build software. Complexity that makes code difficult to understand, maintain, and build on is “bad complexity.” Bad complexity is a major reason why software products fail. Good complexity is part of the software’s purpose and design. Bad complexity is incidental, appearing when programmers or their managers make mistakes during implementation (I’ll discuss what causes this later on).
A useful way to define code quality is the ratio of bad complexity to good complexity. There are major advantages to keeping this ratio low—what I’ve been referring to as “high-quality code.”
First, it keeps development and maintenance costs low over the long term. Consider the following graph:
Source: “Is High Quality Software Worth the Cost?” by Martin Fowler
For any project that lasts more than a few weeks, development speed is partially dependent on code quality. This is a significant factor in total cost of ownership—in other words, the company’s bottom line is directly at risk. One study found that complexity accounts for 25% of the cost of software maintenance and over 17% of total software lifecycle costs. And a 2018 poll by Stripe found the worldwide cost of dealing with “bad code” to be as high as $85 billion per year. These numbers only address costs in terms of development time and payroll; the costs of shipping defective software or being beaten to market by a competitor are also worth considering. Since the effects of bad code persist until it is removed, the only sensible approach is to deal with it early and often.
Second, code quality is a factor in job satisfaction among programmers. Companies that want to attract world-class talent, increase employee engagement, and limit turnover can’t afford to ignore this relationship. Turnover in particular is a studied factor in the success or failure of software projects. This is likely because programmers make more mistakes on projects they are less familiar with.
Third, code quality drives product quality. High-quality code is less likely to have bugs, which are a major driver of user complaints. Code quality has also been correlated to commercial success and reduced security vulnerabilities. Code quality certainly isn’t the only factor in a product’s performance on the market, and it likely isn’t the most important factor either. But even the most competent organizations will struggle to market a product that’s bug-ridden or vulnerable to hacks.
How organizations can increase code quality
Code quality requires investment. It can’t be increased without the commitment of resources—money, development time, and deadline negotiation being the most prominent of these. It also can’t be increased by the use of threats, punishment, or overtime; code can’t be improved under the conditions that lead to bad code in the first place! The good news is that refactoring—the practice of actively increasing the quality of a codebase—does not require all other development activities to cease. It can become a regular and minimally-disruptive part of the development process, something the team attends to while continuing to build and improve features.
Following are some organizational habits and competencies that promote higher-quality code.
Sustainable pace
Programming is difficult under the best of circumstances. As mentioned earlier, a programmer’s ability to code is profoundly dependent on their mental state. Happiness, sufficient rest, and low stress levels are all important ingredients.
The first way to ensure programmers have enough mental resources to do their best work is to avoid overtime. The quality of a programmer’s code drops by the end of a standard eight-hour workday, let alone in the hours beyond. Many programmers have had the experience of coding while excessively tired, stressed, or sick, then discovering the next day that all their work has to be undone or rewritten. This is “net negative work,” code so low-quality that it actually increases the amount of work remaining on the project. Nothing can compensate for a lack of rest over the long term—neither caffeine, nor micro-napping, nor ping-pong tables, nor free beer can replicate the benefits of a restful evening and a good night’s sleep.
Companies that foster burnout by insisting on constant overtime are not just abusive, they’re self-defeating. Any initial gains in productivity will be rapidly drowned out by poor quality. On the other hand, companies that pace their development teams on a short, sustainable and flexible workday, allowing plenty of time off and sick leave, can expect consistent and high-quality output over the long term.
A common cause of overtime in otherwise competent organizations is deadline pressure. Deadlines are often based on financial motivations or scheduling concerns rather than the realities of software development. Programmers can’t speed up a project by thinking harder or typing faster. When a deadline approaches they generally take the only shortcut available to them, which is reduction of quality. This can be avoided by careful planning and strategizing around deadlines.
The first part of this is estimation. Software estimation is a complex skill that requires specific training. Most programmers and managers have not had this training. In the absence of estimation skills, teams are at risk of falling back on oversimplified formulas like “guess how long it will take, then double that guess, then double it again.” The best case scenario here is that the project is done early and project managers are left improvising ways to fill leftover development time. But the worst case scenario is that the project is delivered late or barely functional. So if an organization lacks the time or the will to build software estimation skills, it’s far better to negotiate for extremely generous deadlines than to end up disappointing customers.
The second part of deadline management is prioritization. Prioritization is not just about which things are built first; it’s about which things are built at all. Every development roadmap is liable to include features that are overvalued (difficult to build and not especially valuable to users) or undervalued (easy to build and very valuable to users). An effective manager will focus their team’s efforts on the latter end of the spectrum, especially as deadlines loom close.
If deadlines are managed well, they can be an effective motivator toward the team’s software delivery goals while also leaving enough time for things to be built right. Software quality, as much as anything else, requires dedicated time.
Refactoring as part of the development cycle
Technical debt, like a weed, springs up regardless of what we may do to prevent it. While some development practices can reduce it substantially, there is no way to eliminate it without the benefit of hindsight. Keeping it to a minimum means regularly taking time to find, discuss, and fix it.
Many organizations use the “20% rule” as a guide: 80% of development time is spent on feature development or bugfixes and 20% is spent on refactoring. This principle works best when applied loosely, since teams can’t predict exactly how long a given task will take. And there may be occasional cycles when technical debt has become such a hindrance that it requires a team’s full attention, or cycles when there are pressing feature releases to attend to and technical debt has to take a back seat. The organization should take care not to fall into the trap of doing either of these for longer than necessary.
For the best results, technical debt tasks should be first-class citizens of the planning process. That is, they should exist alongside features, bugs, and testing tasks in the team’s planning software (or on their whiteboard, as the case may be). The 20% rule can be adopted as simply as “one out of every five tasks is set aside for refactoring.” This doesn’t necessarily require technical debt tasks to be planned and scoped to the same level of detail as feature tasks. Rather, the goal is to ensure that the team’s refactoring work is visible and the time they spend on it is protected.
Technical leadership and review
Code quality is second nature to many programmers. They recognize low-quality code, understand its effects, and know how to fix it. To other programmers, the concept is entirely foreign. If a project is staffed entirely by the latter, it doesn’t take long for it to end up mired in slow development and technical issues.
What’s the difference between these two groups of programmers? The answer is simple: study and intentional practice. Unfortunately, neither colleges nor bootcamps nor years of industry experience can be relied on to instill the relevant skills—nothing on a programmer’s resume will necessarily set them apart. But this shouldn’t keep hiring managers up at night. Code quality and refactoring skills can be learned at any stage of a programmer’s career and are far less complex than many of the other concepts they deal with. The quality of a programmer’s work can increase dramatically over the course of a few months if they have access to the right resources and are willing to improve.
What’s more, a software organization can thrive even when their programmers are unevenly skilled. If practiced programmers are chosen to lead the architecture, design, and planning of software projects, their understanding of code quality will be part of the DNA of the development cycle. This kind of technical leadership is essential to high-quality software.
Skill gaps can also be bridged with various forms of review:
- Design reviews happen after a task is specified but before any code is written. The programmer assigned to the task writes a document outlining their approach: the files, classes, and methods they plan to update; the patterns and techniques they will use; and any uncertainties they may have about design or business logic. Then another programmer gives feedback on that document, which may include correcting misconceptions and suggesting helpful patterns or methods that already exist in the codebase. The time taken by this process is sometimes substantial, but it’s a worthwhile investment. Catching a defect this early in the development process is extremely cheap relative to the cost of discovering and fixing it later.
- Pair programming is the practice of assigning two programmers to complete a task together in real time. One programmer controls the keyboard and mouse while the other programmer gives directions. This allows for instantaneous review, feedback, and knowledge transfer during development. Studies have found mixed results as to the raw productivity of two programmers working together versus solo (although it seems to offer a more consistent productivity boost to inexperienced programmers). However, when code quality is taken into consideration, pair programming is almost universally recognized as advantageous.
- Code reviews happen after code is written but before it’s shipped as part of the product. A programmer makes their code changes available to the rest of the team. Then another programmer reads them and gives feedback, often suggesting changes that should be made before the code is shipped. Many code quality issues can only be recognized by a human. This is the last opportunity to catch those before they become part of the product.
If team members are frequently required to check each other’s work and there are no major hostilities or communication failures between them, the quality of their collective work will rise toward the level of the most practiced programmer’s.
Code quality is a competitive advantage
Research on code quality is not scarce (if the 25+ studies linked above aren’t enough, there are plenty more). Time and time again it’s been demonstrated to be a factor in project success or failure, time-to-market, and product longevity. Organizations that prioritize healthy codebases are prioritizing their customers, their programmers, and their own financial viability.
Code quality is also one of the great gifts we programmers can give to ourselves and our colleagues. If we spend a few extra moments naming a variable, rewriting deeply-nested logic, or making a function more predictable, those moments will be paid back in full many times over as we interact with that code over the life of the project. Thinking about how our code affects computers is the bare minimum; thinking about how our code affects humans is a powerful form of empathy in practice, one that no organization can afford to ignore.
Tags: code quality, software engineering, tech debt
25 Comments
I find this discussion compelling. One of the latest phrases I encounter is the fabled “fast paced environment” which tells me management wants solutions and they want them fast. What ends up happening is the requirements are incomplete and of low quality and developers end up committing incomplete, buggy code that is poorly thought out and sloppily written. But it makes IT management happy and those developers advance, regardless of the amount of time that this adds to testing, QA, business checkout and even production support. The time spent is easily 3 to 5 times the original development. This environment of do it fast or go elsewhere is devastating to the business. IT development is a capital investment just like buildings. If not more so. Smart, experienced IT project leads who understand the REAL development environment encourages the developers to be deliberate and concise. It is impossible to eliminate errors from production code. But they can be reduced significantly to the point of the IT staff becoming much more productive overall. Good requirements and producing quality code can reduce overall concept to delivery timeframe by 50%.
Do you track time spent in integration testing, QA Testing, End User validation and production support? Do you even do comprehensive testing before production? How many errors per module or line of code in system test? How many times the business had to request changes because the development missed critical concepts? Does your organization require the business community to sign off on all requirements and design documents before development even starts? Do you negotiate all changes to the requirements once a development starts?
Are the questions in your second paragraph rhetorical? Because a lot of them sound like Big Design Up Front.
I’m totally on-board with code quality, but it doesn’t require signing off on all requirements and design documents before you start coding. That’s Waterfall, a failed methodology. Iterative development (i.e. XP) accomplishes what you want, while still providing the flexibility to give the customer exactly what they want.
There is no such thing as “waterfall,” that is a myth created to sell books. None of the practices you guys repeatedly lie about ever happened.
If you don’t read design documents you should be fired.
I agree that a lot of this Waterfall stuff sounds like a straw man. I only started programming in the 90s so maybe I’m too “young”, but I’ve never actually seen this bogeyman (100-page specifications etc.) applied in practice. As with other revolutions/counter-revolutions, the cure (Agile), when dogmatically over-applied, is probably worse than the disease (unwieldy specifications). In particular, I’ve often seen management misuse Agile as an excuse for lack of planning.
> Although it is possible to be too verbose here, a programmer reading code for the first time is better served by a name that says too much than one that says too little.
To many programmers read that as long names == good, short names == bad. There can be long, rambling names. Context can make short names the best, think of a variable in a list comprehension:’… for x, y in points’ kind of thing. Why repeat context in internal variable names? Striving for concision should be the norm.
I’ve seen this argument before and, in short, I agree. If context is readily available, there’s no need to repeat it in a variable name. However, in normal everyday software development I see “short and meaningless” far more often than I see “long and overly repetitive.” I think concision is already an instinct for a lot of developers, so I stuck to the (perhaps oversimplified) advice given in the article. If I’d wanted to take more time on that topic, I would have discussed concision as well.
Encapsulation, yaay! But remember to state that whilst tutorial examples need to be short, refactoring three, un-repeated lines into a separate function might *decrease* readability for example by forcing you to look away to its definition. Code review discussions, and reading others code can help with the balance.
Good tech leaders/PMs ensure resolution of tech debt is part of the “quote” in response to how long it will take/how much it will cost. Great developers ask their leaders if tech debt is included and if it isn’t, ensure that it is there. If we are doing a 10 day sprint, I always allow for 6 days development/unit test, 2 days for refactoring/integration, a day for defect retesting and a day for any urgent BAUs that cannot wait. If there are no BAU, we grab from the backlog in the following sprint and start early.
And for open source projects code quality will impact ability to involve external contributor 🙂
This has been a highly informative article and a great starting point for discussion in sake of avoiding the quick-and-dirty-pitfall.
Thanks a lot! I’d love to read more on that topic!
Thank you for this article. It is refreshing to get back to the basics of why we should take care of our codebases.
In an era where code metrics is a commodity (via Sonar and other platforms).
Developers start receiving metrics about their code very early in their career and sometimes getting to why code quality is important is overlooked.
This is a nice article about the importance of software quality and a good read for management personnel. However, as a developer that is concerned with good quality code/design, I already know the importance of quality and would like to learn more about how to actually write high quality code. I know basic rules of good software quality and I think I can notice quality when I see it, but in my everyday work life, I often come across questions on how to design things or bad past decisions that cause problems. What is a good source or methodology to build up a solid experience to avoid these kind of problems in the future?
Unfortunately, things like peer programming or code reviews are practiced consistently at my work and there is not much exchange on software quality among colleagues, most of them seem to not care enough. So, I am looking for external ways to build up experience.
I haven’t been in an onsite environment since well before the pandemic but I recall code reviews as complete wastes of time. People come directly from the printer to the meeting where they see the code for the first time, and end up quibbling over formatting because there is no way they can analyze changes. Code reviews are like reading design documents; these are both core responsibilities that nobody takes seriously. In my own work I use GitKraken and review every commit in the project, sometimes downloading the branch and running the changes in a debugger. If a function has been changed I review all its call points to see if the changes make sense.
Code reviews are just another box-check, And with short-attentio-span kids making up so many teams we need them more than ever,
First of all pair programming is a monstrous indignity and should be a criminal offense. When a junior programmer works with a senior that is mentoring, not programming; actual pair programming is a hideously stressful experience and the one time I had to do it I resigned my position at Microsoft the next morning.
As for quality code the one aspect I never see mentioned is legibility. When I started as a developer in 1988 code was already illegible and it has gotten steadily worse. Standards documents have nothing to say about making code easy to parse but rather center only on consistency, ensuring that code is *uniformly* cluttered and jagged and institutionalizing trendy formatting gimmicks as team standards.
Sounds all nice an’ intelligent an’ stuff to speak of “cyclomatic complexity” but before we can apprehend structure and quality we need to be able to read it without reaching for the aspirin, and we are losing ground there.
Regarding your comments on pair programming, I am surprised. We use pair programming to achieve several goals…. 1) where we are bringing a programmer up to speed on how the team likes to work 2) to give programmers a break – they take turns to program/review and it breaks it up. I have found that programmers need a mental break from programming so that they arent “on” all the time – it can be exhausting. By pair programming, being a reviewer not the creator allows for that break and lastly we use it for peer reviewing and it is successful because it invariably gets the team ensuring our coding standards are met
Nice article. I am in the code quality tooling business and I would add a few points that are not often quoted but seems essential to me:
– Code coverage ratio by tests: domain classes (the ones that don’t deal with infrastructure) should be 100% covered. Often developers complain that 10% of a class is hard to test, which means these 10% are not testable, which means these 10% are not well designed, which means these 10% are error-prone. As a result, often we observe that the most error-prone code ends up being not tested!
– Assertions: everyone applauds assertions in tests but almost no-one uses assertions in the code itself. Stuffing your code with assertions is a very powerful way to debunk early corrupted states that are symptoms of bugs. Assertions in code are also executed at unit-test execution time and improve significantly the ROI of efforts put in writing tests. Assertions in code constitutes also great documentation. They are close to the good-old Design by Contract (DbC) trending that unfortunately never became mainstream in our OOP languages.
– State mutability: Caring for state mutability, and especially dealing with immutable classes (whose instances state don’t change once created) and pure methods (that can create new state but don’t change any state) help a lot. This is because when reading and maintaining code, one of the most trickiest task is to understand how and when states are mutated at runtime.
– Component layering: The spaghettis code phenomenon arises from non layered code. If component A uses component B which use A, A and B are not two components but a super-component. A and B are no more unit of development, unit of test, unit of change because they cannot be developed, tested and changed independently. This leads to monolithic legacies that are the exact opposite of quality code.
– The article states: “There is no product or tool that can automatically and definitively rate the quality of a codebase.”
I agree that there is no perfect code quality tooling. Maybe AI will bring us there but we are just not yet there. However existing tools are mature. They bring code quality from a **subjective & disordered practice** to an **objective & systematic practice**. Unit tests are here to check for code correctness. The same way Code quality tools are here to avoid quality erosion that necessarily occurs without tooling, no matter how much effort is put in code review. Again, I am in code quality tooling and my opinion is subjective. Our tool continuously cares for its own code quality – and continuously cares for our users’ code quality – for more than 15 years and it just works.
The author didn’t mention the elimination of mutable state as a major driver of code quality. I’ve noticed that since I consciously started building software with that approach, my quality went way up. It goes hand in hand with the other SOLID principles and clean code objectives. Good technical leaders should be driving these best practices and given the management support to be ruthless about it.
I hear this mantra for, like, 20 years
Nothing is changing
A new shiny startup appears, hires new eager young devs, they quickly write a prototype made of shit and sticks and then it becomes product – with all debts, legacy and so on. This cycle is infinite
So the first thing we have to do is to get rid of this “startup culture”. Until it persist nothing will change
+1 Amen. I’ve heard it for 40 years.
+1 Amen
This was a great article – a good overview and a compelling argument which every executive, product owner and manager in a tech company should read. I’m going to be sharing this one around!
My take on this topic
https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/5291292/Why-Software-Companies-Die
and also about unit tests quality
https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/4051293/Unit-Test-Suite-Quality-Estimation
I wish you talked a little more about team make up and hiring:
– Humans are human; we’re all a little lazy and disorganized at times. Developers are human
– Some developers are lazy and disorganized all the time.
– This will lead to short cut solutions no matter the problem or external constraints.
– OK, hire better people. The market is crazy right now, talented developers are so hard to find nowadays.
– Works gotta get done… So the process continues
H
Hey Isaac! Long time, no see. Excellent article, code quality is so valuable and truly makes or breaks a project in the long run. Every point you made was right on the money and well written, going to share this with my team – hopefully we can all benefit from taking more time to increase the quality of our codebase.
A lot of great points here!
Technical debt is a Product + Engineering problem. A lot of product managers don’t understand how tech debt affects the profit and what to do about it.
And also a perfectly written code can become debt in the future if the “world changes”.
I think most Product Managers and teams could benefit from the process like this one:
https://betterprogramming.pub/technical-debt-as-a-product-engineering-issue-2d805ab49e8c