#26 – Technical debt

Authors comment:

Ah, yes. Good ol’ technical debt, a phrase coined by Ward Cunningham. The metaphor describes how (actively) taking decisions that effect, e.g,, the modularity, architecture or code complexity negatively (creating/increasing the debt), so that creating new functionality will take longer time than normally (the interest).

If our Product Owner and management understands the importance of reducing technical debt, a fixed, permanent amount of the team capacity could be allocated to always reduce the technical debt of your product(s). If they don’t, we need to educate them about the debt and interests that we’re paying. If the PO, when prioritizing the PBIs, take Cost of Delay into consideration, we should be able to convince him/her that spending some time now on reducing the technical debt for a specific product will probably decrease our overall, general time-to-market of new features for that product.