Balancing Technical Debt Reduction and Feature Velocity in Legacy Front-End Systems
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63282/3050-9246.IJETCSIT-V7I1P142Keywords:
Technical Debt, Legacy Front-End Systems, Feature Velocity, Component Architecture, Micro-Frontends, Observability, Enterprise Web ModernizationAbstract
Enterprise front-end systems rarely become hard to change because of one catastrophic decision. In practice, they slow down release by release: a rushed dependency upgrade here, a copied checkout flow there, an accessibility exception that becomes permanent, or a monolithic bundle that nobody wants to touch before a peak business event. This paper examines how teams can reduce that accumulated drag without sacrificing delivery commitments. The study synthesizes established technical-debt literature with an anonymized industry case study drawn from two domains: grocery eCommerce and telecom retail. The proposed framework combines debt triage, incremental refactoring, component-driven architecture, observability, and release-governance practices that protect feature throughput while the codebase is being modernized. Representative results from the case study show double-digit gains in page performance, higher deployment frequency, and fewer escaped UI defects after teams introduced shared components, automated tests, and targeted refactoring windows. The paper argues that the most effective modernization programs are neither rewrite-everything efforts nor purely cosmetic cleanup initiatives; they are delivery-aware engineering programs that treat technical debt as an operating constraint with measurable business impact.
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