How do you handle technical debt in your team?

We introduced a "tech debt budget" - 20% of each sprint is allocated to addressing technical debt. Here is how we got management buy-in:

1. Track time spent on workarounds and bugs caused by debt. Present concrete numbers showing how debt slows feature delivery.

2. Frame it as investment, not cleanup. "Refactoring module X will reduce bug rate by 40% and speed up feature development in that area by 2x."

3. Include debt items in your definition of done for new features. If you touch a module, leave it better than you found it.

The key is making technical debt visible and quantifiable to non-technical stakeholders.

We use a "tech debt register" in our project management tool where developers can log debt items with estimated impact and remediation effort. Each quarter we review the register and prioritize the highest-impact items.

One thing that really helped us was automated code quality metrics. We set up SonarQube dashboards that management can see. When code quality scores drop, it creates natural pressure to address debt.