People do not like debt, but somehow we will be in debt at one point in our lives. If you are in debt and do not manage it well, you will have to pay high interest in the future. Software Development also has debt, and it’s called Technical Debt.
What is Technical Debt? Technical debt is a cost you need to pay back by reworking or refactoring when you choose an easier or faster solution instead of choosing a better solution that takes more time.
NOTE: Technical Debt is not your Undone Work. There are 3 kinds of Technical debt:- Naive Technical Debt- Unavoidable Technical Debt- Strategic Technical Debt (With this kind of technical debt, sometimes you don’t need to pay it back, or it’s a good option to trade off to get the business opportunity. I will share more on Part 2 of this topic.)(see more at https://innolution.com/resources/glossary/technical-debt)Keep it on track
Tracking Technical Debt is important; you will be shocked by what you must pay back. I suggest you track and maintain your debt list to take action to pay before it’s too late.
1. Tracking at Business level:
- Financial reporting: I love to include/ update technical debts in my Business plan. By this way, Technical Debt will be transparent, list them and count on cost must payback and compare with other options for Pros and Cons, so you have full picture with how much you need to pay with all of your options.
- Velocity: number of Technical debts relates to velocity, take technical debt to speed-up, but actually will make you down, you need to track your list out and payback in right time before it makes you slow down and effects to the opportunity to release to market.
2. Tracking at development level:
- Technical debt in Code: bad coding; needs to be tracked and cleaned up asap. (E.g., copied and reused code is fast but can lead to taking more time to refactor…)
- Track Technical debt on your bugs list: Track it once you trade off with a hot-fix. Hot-fixing can be fast. To fix a critical bug, you can apply a hotfix, but you will need to look into the root cause to prevent it from recurring later. Keep this in your debt list.
- Make Technical debt visible in the Product Backlog or use the Technical Debt Backlog to make it transparent and keep track.
- Have a Technical Debt backlog: I love this way to manage and track Technical Debt. Every time your team can post anything into that backlog if they find that it is Technical Debt. Later, the team can look back on that at Sprint Planning.
NEXT POST: How to deal with and pay back Tech Debt.
#TechDebt #Technicaldeb
