Before anything can be done we need to understand Technical Debt and accept that it costs money. Time and money.
We can throw away the existing product and avoid paying the debt, (e.g. rewriting the application or going out of business), but if those are not the options we will sooner or later have to pay for the technical debt.
Either by incurring longer development time for new features, more bugs, recurring bugs, or by fixing the code. In the end we will probably have some balance between these.
Technical Debt – It is like real debt, or like overdraft. There is a feeling that you don’t have time to make all the changes. With overdraft and in general with debt, every month you pay some interest in addition to your regular expenses.
The only real way to reduce the debt is by reducing the expenses and using the left over to reduce the debt. Once you manage to do that the next month the interest you pay is already smaller. Only a tiny bit, but smaller.
You repeat and the next month your debt shrinks further. Every month you can reduce the debt by a bit more and you can also spend some more. The important part is to keep doing this and to get into the habit of paying and reducing the debt. e.g. Your monthly income is 9,000 and your monthly expenses are 10,000. In addition you already have 120,000 in debt (a year of salary) for 1%/month which means you also have 1,200 "financial expense". So this month your debt will grow by 2,200 and next month the interest will be higher. Soon it will be out of control and you won't be able to finance your basic needs. In technical terms it means adding features gets slower and slower and the number of bugs increases.
To stabilize your debt you'll have to reduce your expenses by 2,200 to 7,800 but that means that even to just maintain the current debt you can spend less than you earn. (In the technical analogy, even if you'd like to just maintain the level of your technical debt, you can go much slower than full speed.)
To recover from the debt you need to either declare bankruptcy or you need a program to reduce debt and thus reduce the financial expense. If for one month you can reduce your expense to 7,000 that month you have 2000-1200=800 extra that you can use to repay some of the debt. The next month your debt will be only 119,200 and thus your interest (the so called "financial expense" ) goes down to 1,192.
Another analogy might be a car with all kinds of baggage on it that makes it slow.
