As your development team grows, the codebase grows in complexity and feature development speeds up. Business demands can push teams to cut corners, especially when business demands are high, but this habitually results in growing technical debt. Technical debt represents the long-term price of quick fixes, such as omitting unit tests, copying code, or deferring refactoring. A certain level of debt is unavoidable, uncontrolled debt cripples velocity, increases bugs, and complicates new hire ramp-up.

Success hinges on integrating quality practices into your team’s natural cadence. Prioritize tracking the debt that hurts the most. Not all legacy code requires urgent attention, but the systems that are core to your product or frequently changed should be prioritized. Build a public debt tracker. It enables faster onboarding through visibility and promotes shared responsibility.

Prioritize developers who resist technical shortcuts. Invite them to raise concerns in retrospectives. Make code reviews a standard practice, not a formality. Enforce mandatory peer reviews. Use feedback to mentor, not only to correct. Define explicit coding standards, consistent variable and function names, minimum test thresholds, documentation standards—and stick to them.

Allocate time explicitly for paying down debt. Teams often ignore maintenance in planning. Designate a fixed percentage of sprint capacity for code health. This doesn’t mean slowing down delivery, it means building for long-term speed. You’ll ship features quicker once the system is more maintainable.

Collaborative coding transfers expertise effectively. Matching newcomers with senior engineers helps embed cultural norms and sets the tone for clean code. It also surfaces technical debt early, because newcomers notice what’s been normalized.

Use data to guide your priorities. Track how much time goes to firefighting. Release cadence, нужна команда разработчиков and CI. If these worsen over time despite more people on the team, it means your debt is outpacing your cleanup. Reallocate effort where it’s needed most and foster collective responsibility.

Addressing technical debt isn’t about flawless code—it’s about sustainable progress. Growth brings power, but also fragmentation. By embedding quality into your culture and processes, you transform expansion into sustainable advantage.