Another avenue for cleaning up technical debt

How do you get people to take an active role in cleaning up code? I think that many programmers really like clean code, but often never get around to it because of the time pressure they're under.

I like the XP approach to this - keep track of technical debt - this is a great idea. However, it is often difficult to get people on the business side to take on technical debt because it is hard to quantify a return... it is much easier to do so on a hot new feature. I'm always thinking that there must be another way to be able to take on the debt while still adding something else of value.

So, when I ran across this story - one that links to a story by Ward Cunningham, I took note. (Now, the story is about tracking down complex bugs... (more specifically in a bond report), but the bond report itself is a feature, and if they're doing TDD, they're finding the bugs before they release.) Anyway, this is a great story about getting to clean up code while providing ROI at the same time.