What Happens When Technical Debt Vanishes?

Here’s a thought experiment. Say I wave a magic wand across a codebase and an entire class of technical debt, poof, goes away and immediately evaporates if introduced in the future. For example, maybe I make it so that dead feature flags are simply no longer a problem: they just delete themselves as soon as the engineer wills it. Or maybe large-scale migrations just migrate themselves. Maybe we magically have 100% test coverage, without an engineer lifting a finger.

What will happen to developer productivity?

Surely, developer productivity increases overall.

But will the productivity metrics that we all use as a proxy for “developer productivity” move up and to the right. Let’s explore this idea.