A client’s team spent a full week adding a CSV export to their admin panel. Two engineers, clear requirements, maybe a day of actual work. The rest of the time went to understanding existing code well enough to change it safely. That’s what I call codebase drag: when the codebase makes every task take longer than it should. It doesn’t show up in any dashboard or sprint report.


Your comment reminded me of this article, The Software Quality and Productivity Crisis Executives Won’t Address, which discusses the lack of technical leadership when it comes to tackling technical debt, and that the solution is usually a rewrite.