#Risk

Technical debt rarely fails slowly. It grows quietly for months, then one day nothing can move until it's fixed. How to spot the snowball, why you don't get to choose the avalanche day, and what a lead can do before it arrives.

A multi-tab bug that looked like a one-off defect turned out to be a design assumption the product had outgrown. Why I argued for fixing the model, not just the bug, and how to raise that kind of risk.

Most release risk I've dealt with wasn't a software defect. It was environment differences, unclear ownership of manual steps, late changes and rollback plans nobody had tried. What I learned preparing a high-risk platform migration.