FOFO Flash 5: 5 Quick Ways in 50 seconds. Find Tech Debt Before It Finds You
- Scott Seaborn
- Mar 20
- 2 min read
Updated: Apr 7
In fifty seconds lets find five rapid-fire ways to identify and tackle it before it costs you time, money, and sanity.
1 - Follow the Frustration Trail
- Ask your tech teams “what's holding you down”. Pain points = prime tech debt hotspots.
- If releases are constantly delayed or require endless patches, you’ve got a problem.
💡 The more your team complains, the bigger the debt.
2 - Check the Change Failure Rate (CFR)
- How often do deployments break things? If it’s more than 15%, tech debt is lurking.
- High CFR means fragile code, poor test coverage, or tangled dependencies.
💡 Fast fixes today lead to firefighting tomorrow—track failures before they multiply.
3 - Hunt Down Abandoned Code, Systems and Zombie Spreadsheets!
- Look for outdated libraries, forgotten scripts, and half-migrated services.
- Include undefined technical debt, like spreadsheets, no one owns, or one person owns it and they are in a silo, if it runs in between systems, it’s a ticking time bomb.
💡 Dont just map your technical landscape, map your spreadsheets
4 - Run a Dependency Health Check
- Check if your core tools and frameworks are up to date.
- If your stack relies on unsupported tech, you’re one update away from disaster.
💡 Outdated dependencies = security risks, slow fixes, and hidden costs.
5 - Calculate the "Wasted Effort Ratio"
- How much time is spent fixing vs. building? If debugging eats more than 20% of dev time, tech debt is the culprit.
- Track how often teams say, “This should be simple, but…”
💡 Every hour lost to bad code is stolen from innovation—measure it to control it.
There's 5 quick flash ways to find your Tech Debt in fifty seconds.
Map the gaps
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