I've been listening to an episode of The Changelog podcast "You call it tech debt I call it malpractice"[1], which got me thinking what if every time we as developers wanted to to introduce some tech debt we had to fill out a form detailing our decision making and the required remediation work. These could then be reviewed periodically.

Every time we cut some corner, fail to sufficiently document or test a change, or otherwise leave the code base in a less than an ideal state there would be a trail of documentation. We could then begin to attach a cost to each documented case, and start to have a systematic process of performing cost-benefit analysis.

[1]: https://pca.st/episode/34cdb2de-7ff6-4601-b3cc-fd6c6f3c47ff