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Couple of simple ideas for the zombie flag problem:

- When adding a flag immediately file a bug to remove the flag by a certain date. Enforce in code review. The bug count will surface the problem to the management.

- When a flag is past due date start firing non-fatal incidents. The incident count will also surface the problem to the management.

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Heh. I've been there and tried to do this with feature flags and a handful of other tech debt work.

It can feel good to make people do their chores, but you can also burn a _lot_ of bridges by forcing relatively minor maintenance work to be high priority like this.

It’s not forced or high priority - it just surfaces tech debt to management in the way they can easily quantify and prioritize.

Maybe this is just a terminology mismatch, but when you say "incident" that's been a pretty urgent process everywhere I've worked. Other people are talking about breaking CI, which just sounds miserable.

Raising awareness to management is great though. Especially if you can quantify it in terms of things that matter to them more than "tech debt". Like startup latency or a direct dollar cost.

Yeah, there should be more than one level of incident severity, this would be on the lower end.

Agreed surfacing the problem to mgmt is critical, but many mgmt teams do not care about but count

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