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When your engineering team expands, the complexity of your codebase intensifies and you ship updates more rapidly. Many teams rush to deliver, when stakeholders demand faster results, but this habitually results in growing technical debt. It’s the hidden cost of prioritizing speed over sustainability, including ignoring test coverage, duplicating logic, or deferring refactoring. While some debt is inevitable, unmanaged debt slows you down, increases bugs, and creates friction for newcomers.
To handle technical debt effectively as you scale, embed quality into your daily workflow. Start by documenting the most critical areas of technical debt. Not all legacy code requires urgent attention, but the systems that are core to your product or frequently changed should be prioritized. Maintain a visible debt backlog. This transparency helps new team members understand the landscape and promotes shared responsibility.
When hiring, look for developers who care about code quality and are willing to advocate for it. Empower them to challenge shortcuts in planning sessions. Make code reviews a standard practice, not a formality. Require at least one other person to review changes before merging. Turn reviews into teaching moments. Define explicit coding standards, uniform identifier patterns, нужна команда разработчиков minimum test thresholds, API docs upkeep—and enforce them rigorously.
Dedicate sprint capacity to debt reduction. Engineering calendars fill up with new work. Set aside 15–20% of each sprint for technical upkeep. You’re not sacrificing velocity, it means ensuring enduring agility. Over time, the team will move faster because the codebase will be easier to navigate and modify.
Pair programming can also be a powerful tool when bringing new people on board. Pairing less seasoned team members with veterans helps share best practices and sets the tone for clean code. It also surfaces technical debt early, because outsiders challenge invisible assumptions.
Use data to guide your priorities. Watch regression rates and incident response. Release cadence, and CD pipeline flakiness. If metrics regress despite added resources, it means your debt is outpacing your cleanup. Reallocate effort where it’s needed most and ensure transparency across roles.
It’s not about eliminating all debt, but managing it wisely. Growth brings power, but also fragmentation. By institutionalizing good practices, you turn scaling into resilience.