Talking about technical debt requires specific professional collocations. Practice the language for scheduling debt work, justifying it to stakeholders, maintaining a backlog, and measuring the impact of refactoring.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
The team agreed to ___ two days per sprint to addressing existing technical debt before it slowed down delivery.
Allocate time to technical debt is the formal sprint planning collocation. 'Set aside' is informal but natural; 'spend' focuses on consumption not planning; 'use' is too generic. 'Allocate' is the precise resource-planning term used in sprint capacity discussions.
2 / 5
The engineering lead had to ___ the business case for spending a full sprint on refactoring before new features.
Justify the business case is the standard collocation when arguing for technical investment. 'Make the case' is also natural; 'build the case' implies longer preparation; 'explain' is too weak. 'Justify' specifically implies overcoming skepticism with data and reasoning — common in tech debt conversations with non-technical stakeholders.
3 / 5
We created a technical debt ___ to track all known issues and prioritize them for future sprints.
Technical debt backlog is the Agile-specific collocation for the list of deferred improvements. 'Register' is a risk management term; 'list' is informal; 'log' lacks the prioritization nuance of a backlog. 'Backlog' is the canonical Agile term for a prioritized queue of work.
4 / 5
After the refactoring sprint, the team noticed that build times had ___ by 40%.
Build times had dropped is the most natural collocation for a measurable performance improvement. 'Reduced' and 'decreased' are accurate but more formal; 'fallen' sounds accidental. 'Drop' collocates naturally with time, latency, and performance metrics in engineering discussions.
5 / 5
The principal engineer recommended scheduling a dedicated sprint to ___ the authentication module's legacy code.
Refactor the legacy code is the standard collocation for structured technical debt reduction. 'Rewrite' implies starting from scratch; 'clean up' is informal; 'fix' implies there is a specific bug. 'Refactor' is the precise technical term for restructuring existing code without changing external behavior.