Elephant in the Room – Technical Debt
Over the last few months there have been a few interesting articles on technical debt. In my view, there are two items that need to be addressed around technical debt:
- An understanding by both the team and stakeholders from day 1 of a project that technical debt will occur, and an agreement of how to rise it and have a sensible discussion without the classic blame culture associated
- A backlog of technical debt that isn’t separated from the product backlog, and is prioritised appropriately from both an ROI and a team velocity – separation will essentially mean forgotten and ignored in my view
- Who’s paying for technical debt? Its unfortunate, but in many corporations, technical debt is a taboo word that can never be discussed, and must therefore be resolved by the team behind closed doors, in their own time.
“When management lacks any understanding of what its teams can handle, neither microservices nor any other architecture will help. Debt piles up until default is inevitable”
