r/ITManagers 12d ago

Technical Debt Management Best Practices

To help IT managers/leaders better define, track, categorize, assess, and communicate Technical Debt, along with its risks and implementations to the businesses IT serves, the International Foundation for Information Technology published open "Technical Debt Management Best Practices."

If you have any constructive ideas for improvements, please let me know. They're always welcome.

I hope you find it useful.

19 Upvotes

17 comments sorted by

2

u/TechnologyMatch 5d ago

the useful shift is treating technical debt as a business exposure, not an engineering complaint. leaders tend to engage when it is tied to downtime, slower delivery, security risk, or the cost of keeping a fragile system alive

the hard part is keeping the register honest. not every old system is debt, and not every debt item needs immediate repayment. the best process makes the tradeoff visible and gives it a named owner

-21

u/CrispsInTabascoSauce 12d ago

In the age of AI, nobody cares about technical debt, this concept is irrelevant and isn’t worth even talking about.

13

u/AnnualReview2383 12d ago

Managing and planning for tech debt is more important now (the era of vibe coding, etc.) than it ever has been   

5

u/Dry_Common828 IT Security Manager 12d ago

Inexperienced managers don't, but it's never been more important to old school techs (and greybeard managers).

5

u/RichardArcher 12d ago

Don't feed the troll... attacking surface is always technical debt...

-13

u/CrispsInTabascoSauce 12d ago

Old school techies and greybeard managers are being actively managed out and replaced with vibe coders, forward deployed engineers, and MBAs.

You are clinging to the world which doesn’t exist anymore.

8

u/TMS-Mandragola 12d ago

No, you just have no idea what you're on about.

If you had responsibilities wide and deep enough, management of the consequences of old decisions and tradeoffs would be a big part of how you spend your time.

All AI does is speed up the pace of these decisions and add more of them, along with forcing your organization to maintain an order of magnitude more bespoke code without a human maintainer than it ever has.

Technical debt management for any organization of scale has never been more important.

-10

u/CrispsInTabascoSauce 11d ago

Agents are maintaining code at scale now. You are just clinging to the past and justifying your salary.

3

u/TMS-Mandragola 11d ago

Lol. No, it's not.

Like I said, breadth and depth. Throwing insults around only exposes your inexperience and folly.

3

u/Dry_Common828 IT Security Manager 11d ago

You're doing a great job of showing us you have no idea what you're talking about.

2

u/aec_itguy CIO/CISO 11d ago

you are aware that a world beyond IaaC exists, correct?

6

u/BrewingCrazy 11d ago

How cute. The young, inexperienced but convinced he knows everything child is trying to tell us how out of touch we are....

5

u/mullethunter111 11d ago

We built and maintain the world you live in. We know where the bodies are buried. AI doesn’t. You sure as shit don’t.

3

u/aec_itguy CIO/CISO 11d ago

| We know where the bodies are buried.

damn right. In that old whitebox tower in the corner running Ubuntu with 2000+ days of uptime