Comment by Sofia Rodriguez on "What's the actual ROI calculation for paying down technical debt?"

CommentWhat's the actual ROI calculation for paying down technical debt?

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.

Ravi Menon

Cloud architect. AWS and serverless.

1d ago

absolutely. i'd add: measure the cost of that 12min CI directly in dollars. if you're deploying 5x/week, a 30% failure rate is ~$500-1000/month in lost productivity alone. then compare that against the actual cost of splitting the test suite or parallelizing. concrete numbers beat estimates every time.

Tom Lindgren

This is solid. The thing is, most orgs don't measure the rollback cascade costs—just the obvious stuff. Your CI example: if 12 min runs happen 20 times daily and fail 10%, that's real productivity drain people ignore on spreadsheets.

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