Robby Russell - Prepare to tack: Steering Rails apps out of technical debt - Rails World 2024

Drop the “technical debt” framing and position improvements as strategic investments that increase efficiency, reduce risk and improve customer experience

Never do complete rewrites - treat your app like it’s the last one you’ll ever work on and focus on continuous improvements

Question and remove unused/outdated code, features, data and dependencies regularly - the easiest feature to maintain is one that doesn’t exist

Make maintainability part of your team’s identity and daily habits rather than a one-time effort. Build a culture that values and celebrates incremental improvements

Avoid solo heroics - make collaboration and knowledge sharing core team practices, especially for major refactoring work

Be cautious with gems and external dependencies - they often add more complexity and maintenance burden than value. Consider writing simpler custom solutions

Test new approaches on existing stable features first rather than introducing them with new functionality

Stop waiting for permission - frame maintenance work as essential rather than optional and tie it to business goals

Embrace your monolith for smaller teams - keeping everything under one roof often leads to less overhead and complexity than distributed architectures

Make unreliable tests either reliable or remove them completely - tests should propel development forward, not hold it back