Technical Debt Register Template

Debt register with Fowler quadrant taxonomy, interest, principal, risk-weighted priority score, triage, budget and reporting

Arsitektur & Desain SistemStandartech debt register mathDiperbarui 20 Okt 2026

Buka di editorUnduh .md

Cara menggunakan: Use to record and prioritise technical debt for a product or team. Agree the definitions and capacity budget first, then estimate interest as well as principal for each item. The main pitfall is a register without a repayment budget, which becomes a list nobody acts on.

Pratinjau

Technical Debt Register: [Product, system or team]

Register for recording, prioritising and paying down technical debt: a shared taxonomy (including Martin Fowler's technical debt quadrant), the register itself with interest, principal and a priority score, the triage process, the capacity budget for repayment and how progress is reported. Based on common engineering practice. Replace every [bracketed] value and every row marked Example.

Field	Value
Register ID	[TDR-PRODUCT]
Scope	[Systems, repositories or services covered]
Owner	[@tech-lead]
Contributors	[Teams]
Review cadence	[e.g. Every two weeks in backlog refinement; quarterly summary]
Last reviewed	YYYY-MM-DD
Related	[Architecture description], [Fitness functions], [Risk register]

1. Purpose and definitions

Technical debt is any design or implementation choice that makes future change slower, riskier or more expensive than it needs to be, compared with a reasonable alternative. Defects with user-visible impact go to the bug tracker; missing features go to the product backlog. A debt entry may reference either when they are a symptom.

Term	Meaning in this register
Principal	Effort to remove the debt, in engineer-hours
Interest	Recurring extra cost the debt causes, in engineer-hours per month (slower changes, incidents, manual work, workarounds)
Risk factor	Multiplier from 1 to 3 for security, compliance or outage exposure not captured by interest
Payoff horizon	Period over which interest is counted when prioritising; Example: 12 months

2. Debt taxonomy

2.1 Technical debt quadrant

Martin Fowler's quadrant classifies debt by intent (deliberate or inadvertent) and by judgement (prudent or reckless). The descriptions below are written for this template.

	Deliberate	Inadvertent
Reckless	The team knowingly skipped good practice with no plan to repay; example: no tests to hit a demo date and no follow-up ticket	The team did not know a better practice existed; example: hand-built SQL strings because nobody knew about parameterised queries
Prudent	The team chose a shortcut consciously, recorded it and planned repayment; example: single-region launch with a ticket to add a second region before scale-up	The team learned later what the design should have been; example: the domain model only became clear after a year in production

Use the quadrant in retrospectives: reckless entries point to process or skills gaps; prudent-inadvertent entries are a normal result of learning.

2.2 Categories

Code	Category	Typical examples
ARC	Architecture	Tight coupling between services, shared database, missing boundaries
COD	Code	Duplication, very large classes, dead code, poor naming
TST	Test	Missing or flaky tests, slow suites, no contract tests
INF	Infrastructure	Manual provisioning, unpatched base images, snowflake servers
DEP	Dependencies	End-of-life frameworks, unmaintained libraries, pinned old versions
DOC	Documentation	Missing runbooks, outdated diagrams, undocumented APIs
SEC	Security	Hard-coded secrets, weak crypto, missing audit logging
DAT	Data	Unclear ownership, missing constraints, inconsistent schemas

3. Register

3.1 Priority score

Priority compares the interest paid over the payoff horizon with the cost of fixing, adjusted for risk:

P = R \times \frac{I \times H}{C}

where $I$ is interest in engineer-hours per month, $H$ is the payoff horizon in months, $C$ is principal in engineer-hours and $R$ is the risk factor (1 to 3). $P > 1$ means fixing the item is expected to pay back within the horizon. Rank by $P$ , then by due dates imposed by compliance or end-of-life events.

Example for TD-001 with $H = 12$ : $P = 1.5 \times \frac{16 \times 12}{80} = 1.5 \times 2.4 = 3.6$ .

3.2 Register table

ID	Description	Location	Quadrant / category	Impact	Interest $I$ (h/month)	Principal $C$ (h)	$R$	Priority $P$	Owner	Status
TD-001	Example: Order and invoice services share one database schema; every schema change needs both teams	`orders-db`, services `order-svc`, `invoice-svc`	Prudent-inadvertent / ARC	Releases blocked twice a month	16	80	1.5	3.6	[@team-orders]	In progress
TD-002	Example: Reporting module duplicates tax calculation logic	`reporting/tax.py`	Reckless-inadvertent / COD	Divergent totals found twice a year	4	120	1.0	0.4	[@team-finance]	Accepted (not now)
TD-003	Example: Payment SDK version reaches end of support in 5 months	`payments/`	Prudent-deliberate / DEP	No security patches after end of support	10	40	2.0	6.0	[@team-payments]	Planned for sprint 42
TD-004	Example: Database password in a deployment script	`deploy/legacy.sh`	Reckless-deliberate / SEC	Credential exposure	2	16	3.0	4.5	[@platform]	Open
[TD-nnn]	[What and why it hurts]	[Path, service, component]	[Quadrant / code]	[Effect]	[h]	[h]	[1-3]	[P]	[@name]	[Open / Planned / In progress / Accepted / Closed]

Arithmetic check for the examples: TD-002 $= 1.0 \times 48 / 120 = 0.4$ ; TD-003 $= 2.0 \times 120 / 40 = 6.0$ ; TD-004 $= 3.0 \times 24 / 16 = 4.5$ .

3.3 Status definitions

Status	Meaning
Open	Recorded and estimated, not yet triaged
Planned	Accepted for repayment in a named iteration or quarter
In progress	Work has started; link the ticket
Accepted	Consciously left in place; review date set; reason recorded
Closed	Repaid or the affected code was retired; date and evidence recorded

4. Triage process

Capture. Anyone adds an entry with a description, location and rough impact. Shortcuts taken deliberately during delivery are logged in the same pull request that introduces them.
Estimate. The owning team estimates interest and principal at the next refinement session. Use ranges when unsure and record the midpoint.
Score. Compute $P$ and set the risk factor. Security and compliance items with $R = 3$ are escalated to [@security-lead].
Decide. At the review, each item becomes Planned, Accepted with a review date, or is merged with another entry.
Verify. When closed, record the evidence (merged change, metric improvement, removed component).

Trigger	Action
New item with $R = 3$	Review within 5 working days
Item with $P \geq 3$ open for more than one quarter	Escalate to engineering manager
End-of-life date within 6 months	Plan regardless of $P$

5. Budget allocation

Item	Value
Capacity share for debt repayment	Example: 20% of each iteration's planned capacity
Capacity this quarter	Example: 6 engineers x 60 days x 6 h x 20% = 432 engineer-hours
Allocation rule	Example: Highest $P$ first; at least one item with $R \geq 2$ per iteration
Exceptions	Example: Budget may be lent to a release for at most one iteration and is repaid in the next
Approver for changes	[@engineering-manager]

Planned use this quarter: [list the items and hours]. Example: TD-003 (40 h), TD-004 (16 h), TD-001 (80 h), leaving 296 h for items raised during the quarter.

6. Reporting

Metric	Definition	Last quarter	This quarter	Trend
Open items	Count of Open, Planned and In progress	Example: 34	29	Improving
Total monthly interest	Sum of $I$ over open items	142 h	118 h	Improving
Items added / closed	New entries versus closures	9 / 6	7 / 12	Improving
Budget used	Hours spent on repayment / hours allocated	380 / 432	410 / 432	Stable
High-risk items open	Count with $R = 3$	3	1	Improving
[Metric]	[Definition]	[ ]	[ ]	[ ]

Narrative: [Two or three sentences for leadership on the effect of repayment.] Example: Splitting the shared order database (TD-001) removed the most frequent release blocker; lead time for order changes dropped from 6 to 3 days.

Standard and licence note

Based on common engineering practice for technical debt management. The technical debt quadrant is a concept by Martin Fowler ("TechnicalDebtQuadrant", martinfowler.com, 2009), described here in original words. Original text written for this collection; examples are illustrative. Template licence: MIT.

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