We (or at least I) also think of it as leverage. We also have a very strong 80/20 ethic, so we don't have particular qualms about using the leverage that this debt can provide.
We don't do anything magical; there is no secret sauce, noe no spreadsheets with formulae or anything fancy; it's literally just a series of wiki articles and Jira tickets with issue type "Debt" so we can easily find the documented debt and make plans when/whether to retire it.
So the concrete formal mechanism is "use your bug tracking system and flag them somehow so you can filter/search for them."
I will add some additional links that our top-level debt page references as useful:
We don't do anything magical; there is no secret sauce, noe no spreadsheets with formulae or anything fancy; it's literally just a series of wiki articles and Jira tickets with issue type "Debt" so we can easily find the documented debt and make plans when/whether to retire it.
So the concrete formal mechanism is "use your bug tracking system and flag them somehow so you can filter/search for them."
I will add some additional links that our top-level debt page references as useful:
http://chrissterling.gettingagile.com/2008/10/20/managing-so...
http://enterprisearchitect.typepad.com/ea/2008/10/watch-your...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqeJFYwnkjE (Video: Ward Cunningham on technical debt)