[sandal]

> I would give the same kind of advice that financial advisors give for getting out of credit card debt: "find the card with the highest interest rate, make minimum payments on all other cards, and pay as much as possible on the highest interest rate debt until it is paid off... then recurse"

This is great advice and is ultimately what we focused on once I got past this initial triage/prioritization problem in the org I was helping.

> To make the analogy work the backlog needs to get rated on how much each open issue costs the company. Most organizations use some stratified measure of "severity". Few actually try to put a price on a problem, but I think it's worth the effort to try.

This is hard to do when the backlog is increasing by hundreds of open issues every couple months.

But the trick is ultimately to find a way to very quickly trim the backlog and see what crops back up, and then put each resurfacing issue through an economic decision making framework (even if it's a back-of-the-napkin calculation), as you suggest.