Technical Debt Management Strategies

All about technical debt, how to recognize, visualize and avoid it

Kehrwoche: What Swabian Cleaning Teaches About Technical Debt

Kehrwoche—a Swabian cleaning tradition—is scarier than breaking the build on Friday afternoon. At least the build doesn’t remember next Tuesday. Mrs. Schmid from the second floor does, and she remembers well. What does a weekly cleaning schedule in southern Germany have to do with technical debt? More than most software teams want to admit.

Why Real Professionals Will Never Be Replaced by AI

The elephant everyone ignores: AI can generate code faster than you can type. GitHub Copilot autocompletes entire functions. ChatGPT builds APIs from prompts. Typing is dead. So why will real professionals never be replaced? Because “vibe coding”—describe what you want, ship what AI generates—is a productivity illusion that collapses spectacularly in production. When code generation becomes trivial, understanding what that code costs, where it fails, why it breaks under load becomes everything. AI generates syntax. Professionals understand execution, failure modes, operational cost, and production consequences. The differentiator isn’t typing speed—it’s mastering the feedback loop: write code, watch it fail, understand why, refine thinking. This discipline can’t be automated. Prompt engineers generate code. Real professionals ensure it survives contact with reality.

Most Software Teams Are Lying to Themselves—2026 Needs to Be Different

Happy New Year 2026! 🎉

Fix one piece of technical debt this week—not next quarter. .NET 10, analyzers, and tests are ready; discipline is the only missing part.

2025 in Review: The Year .NET Stopped Lying to Itself

Forget the hype—2025 was when .NET tooling finally stopped pretending complexity doesn’t exist Three tools won by being honest: Aspire exposed topology, TUnit killed flaky tests, Testcontainers made infrastructure real

.NET 10: Timing Is the New Technical Debt

2025 reshapes the .NET ecosystem with faster release cycles and shared responsibility. Discover why migrating to .NET 10 by Q1 2026 — and supporting your dependencies — turns timing into sustainable ROI.

Your Tests Are Lying — Mutation Testing in .NET

It begins like many stories in software: a well-intentioned developer joining a project, determined to do things properly. You arrive at a codebase that has grown organically, perhaps even chaotically. You decide you will bring order. You set up unit testing, you configure continuous integration, you measure code coverage. You write dozens or hundreds of tests. Every public method is touched, every branch is at least executed. The dashboard lights up green. You feel, quite frankly, on top of things.

Then one day, production breaks under your watch

PackageDownload: NuGet's Forgotten Power Tool

PackageDownload arrived in NuGet 4.8 to solve a niche but genuine problem: downloading packages without adding assembly references. It works. But its version syntax requirements and complete disregard for Central Package Management reveal the messy reality of platform evolution.

Clean Code: A Lip Service, Not a Standard

Clean Code is often praised but rarely practiced effectively. This article explores how misunderstood ideals and over-engineering harm .NET systems, how to recognize such failures early, and which C# best practices and official guidelines truly support maintainable software.

Buzzword-Driven Development vs. Fundamental Software Quality

Explore why fundamental software quality practices in .NET must never be overlooked for trendy buzzwords, including recommended analyzers and project settings for managing technical debt effectively.

Instruction by Design: Transforming ADRs into Actionable AI Guidance

Discover how to transform architectural decision records (ADRs) into actionable, AI-ready guidance for teams and copilots—boosting consistency, onboarding, and automation in your development workflow.

Vibe Coding in .NET: Creative Catalyst or Maintenance Risk?

In the world of software development, there’s a recurring tension between discipline and improvisation. Somewhere along that spectrum lies a phenomenon increasingly referred to as Vibe Coding. The term evokes a style of development where engineers follow intuition and momentum rather than formal plans, processes, or design patterns.

It’s fast, fluid, and occasionally brilliant. But is it sustainable in a .NET-based enterprise context?

Managing Errors, Warnings, and Configurations in C# and .NET

When we activated static code analysis for the first time in one of my last projects, the overwhelming number of warnings exceeded expectations and highlighted gaps in the code. Without making any changes, the project already had a significant number of warnings. After activating additional analyzers and updating some configurations, this number temporarily increased dramatically.

The high number of warnings was initially daunting, but we saw it as an opportunity to significantly improve our code quality. At first glance, it seemed easier to suppress or ignore these warnings. But as I often remind my team, “The code you create is a valuable legacy, so it’s important to build it carefully.” Ignoring warnings today creates obstacles for future developers—and that could very well include you six months down the line.

This experience reinforced the importance of managing warnings and errors systematically. Let me share some of the lessons we learned, the strategies we used to tame those 60,000 warnings, and how you can apply these techniques to your own projects.