Why I Built a Technical Debt Ratio Calculator

Every time I tried to argue for technical debt cleanup as an engineering leader, the conversation devolved into hunches: “It feels like we’re losing a sprint every quarter,” or “This module always slows the team down.” That vagueness kept the investment conversations soft and easy to punt.

So I dove into the research—SQALE, Stripe’s Developer Coefficient, the meta-analyses on debt density and remediation cost—and built a browser-based Technical Debt Ratio calculator that turns those studies into a fast, defensible workflow.

Now, instead of waving my hands through debt discussions, I plug in what it would cost to clean things up, see the debt ratio and which buckets hurt the most, let the tool figure out how much we’ve already invested based on team size and salary, adjust how much capacity we could spend to see how quickly we get back to healthy, and share that snapshot so everyone works from the same facts.

Let me know if you find it useful or would like to have more features.