Plan to pay technical debt

The very moment we write code for a project, we start collecting some sort of technical debt since some decisions start to be frozen in time and rest of project development will be dependent upon it.

Initial development of any project is fastest and that is also the period when groundwork for rate of technical debt is happening unknowingly. A choice of programming language, the community might be moving in a given direction which you are not following closely, decided to use certain IDE or tool, which is on its way to be EOL'ed as a better version has come along etc.

Therefore, it is very important to have a plan to address technical debt along with project plan from very beginning. As the project progresses, needed adjustments are made according to situations It becomes a living document for the life of project.

Some examples

Are you using Open Source components ?

You might need to have a plan to upstream your changes have a plan for upgrading the OSS component

Upgrading your host build OS ?

If you are using Linux for build systems, they have a life-time, a good plan would be to have a plan to upgrade your distro or use some container technology

Are you adding TODO in your source code ?

TODO's are usually direct additions to technical debt, at least they are called out. Monitor the number and have a plan to address them.

Are there workarounds, duplicate code, some other common anti-patterns, have a plan to identify them and address them

And so on ...