Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions (AZ-400) Practice

Evaluating technical debt effectively requires an understanding of how much time a development team spends addressing issues that arise from suboptimal design choices or code that requires refactoring. The percentage of overall time spent on rework provides a clear metric for this because it directly correlates to the effort expended to correct, improve, or maintain aspects of the code that should ideally be less burdensome.

In the context of technical debt, rework encompasses activities such as fixing bugs, performing enhancements due to incomplete solutions, or refactoring code to improve performance or maintainability. This metric captures both the volume and severity of the debt by indicating how much of the team's resources are allocated to addressing past decisions that have led to inefficiencies.

The other choices do not directly reflect the presence or magnitude of technical debt. The number of code modules, for instance, gives little insight into their quality or the challenges of managing them. The number and percentage of unit test failures can indicate issues within code but do not necessarily correlate with broader development inefficiencies or technical debt. These metrics might show areas needing improvement but fail to encapsulate the overall burden of technical debt in relation to the resources expended for remediation tasks.