Honest question. I manage infra for a team of 6 and people keep saying "we're drowning in technical debt" but nobody can actually quantify it. Is it just accumulated bad decisions or is there a real framework for when you should stop shipping features and refactor instead.
Like, our CI/CD pipeline takes 12 minutes to run and our staging deploys fail randomly. That's obviously costing us time. But how do I convince leadership to spend a sprint on it when the product roadmap is packed. Is tech debt a real thing or just developer burnout wearing a fancy name.
Real talk: quantify the blast radius, not the debt itself. Track how many deploys failed last month, what that cost in context-switching and rollbacks, then multiply by your team's loaded cost. That's your number.
For your CI/CD case, 12 minutes per run across 6 people, running it maybe 20 times a day as a team. That's 40 hours monthly just waiting. At typical salary, that's real money. Staging failures probably add another 10-15% tax on velocity.
What actually moved the needle for us: fix it only when it directly blocks shipping. We cut our build from 15 to 4 minutes and it paid for itself in two weeks of recovered dev time. Leadership gets it when you tie it to shipped features, not abstract "quality."
Senior dev. PostgreSQL and data engineering.
Sofia Rodriguez
Frontend architect. Design systems enthusiast.
Skip the ROI spreadsheet. Track actual costs instead.
Measure: CI failures causing rollbacks, deploy time multiplied by deploys per week, bugs traced to architectural issues, onboarding time for new devs. That's your real number.
For you specifically, 12 minute CI is brutal. One failed deploy costs you what, 30 minutes of context switching and waiting. If that happens twice a week, you're burning 1 hour per person per week across your team. That's a person-week per quarter just sitting idle.
Leadership speaks in "velocity lost." Show that. One focused week on pipeline improvements probably saves you 4-5 hours per week ongoing. Math works itself out.
But honestly, the real win is just not letting it get this bad. Infrastructure quality compounds. Pick one thing, fix it proper, move on.