Assessing tech debt urgency.

Debt should already be categorized by business relevance to support this. Compared against known upcoming priority, it can be broken down into high-level categories:

  • Relevant to upcoming projects.
  • Not relevant to immediately understood needs.
  • Relevant to risk in any system which may suddenly come up as an unforeseen priority.

When used in context of project work, this can be better than a 20% allocation of time.