How do you manage technical debt in a sprint?

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Technical debt is the accumulated cost of fixing or improving the quality of your code, design, or architecture over time. It can slow down your development, increase your maintenance costs, and reduce your customer satisfaction. How do you manage technical debt in a sprint, when you have a fixed timebox and a commitment to deliver value to your stakeholders? Here are some tips to help you balance technical debt and business value in your Scrum sprints.

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Eder Rodrigues

Product Builder & Startup Mentor | ex-Nubank | Reforge | Platforms | FinTech

1 Identify technical debt

The first step to manage technical debt is to identify it and make it visible. You can use various tools and techniques to assess the quality of your code, such as code reviews, static analysis, testing, refactoring, and technical spikes. You can also use feedback from your customers, users, and stakeholders to identify any issues or gaps in your product functionality, usability, or performance. You can create a backlog of technical debt items and prioritize them based on their impact and urgency.

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Eder Rodrigues

Product Builder & Startup Mentor | ex-Nubank | Reforge | Platforms | FinTech
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One helpful habit is to ask engineers to come up with suggestions of improvements at the end of every sprint. It can be things that are not working as expected, pieces of code not following the standards, as well as parts that are okay but take too much time from the team, either debugging or simply being used.

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2 Plan technical debt

The second step to manage technical debt is to plan how much and when to pay it off. You can use different strategies to allocate time and resources for technical debt, such as dedicating a percentage of your sprint capacity, a whole sprint, a part of your sprint review or retrospective, or a continuous improvement process. For example, you could dedicate 10-20% of your sprint capacity to the most important items from your backlog, focus on resolving the most critical or complex issues every fourth or fifth sprint, discuss the trade-offs and benefits of paying off technical debt versus delivering new features during sprint reviews or retrospectives, and apply the boy scout rule during continuous improvement processes.

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Eder Rodrigues

Product Builder & Startup Mentor | ex-Nubank | Reforge | Platforms | FinTech
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While prioritizing items, it's also important to consider the impact of such items on team performance and wellbeing. There could be pieces of code that are okay, ie. not buggy nor wrong, but are very difficult to maintain, debug or use. Those can slow down the team and increase stress.

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3 Track technical debt

The third step to manage technical debt is to track the progress and results of your payments. You can use various metrics and indicators, such as cyclomatic complexity, code coverage, defect density, customer satisfaction, user retention, or return on investment, to measure the impact of technical debt on your product quality. Additionally, tools and dashboards can be used to visualize and communicate your technical debt status and trends to your team and stakeholders.

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Eder Rodrigues

Product Builder & Startup Mentor | ex-Nubank | Reforge | Platforms | FinTech
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It's really important to demonstrate the reason why a tech debt is part of the game, why it will be created, why and when it will be prioritized and the value unlocked by paying it off each time. This will create a virtuous cycle with stakeholders, getting them to understand and defend time allocation for it in the future.

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4 Learn from technical debt

The fourth step to manage technical debt is to learn from your experience and improve your practices. You can use feedback loops and retrospectives to identify the root causes of technical debt, such as technical decisions that are not suitable or scalable, business decisions that affect your product vision or strategy, process decisions that affect product reliability or maintainability, and people decisions that affect team skills or culture. Additionally, you can use experiments and hypotheses to test and validate your technical debt assumptions and solutions, such as the expected outcome of paying off debt, how it will affect product quality, value, and delivery, and what metrics you will use to measure the results. Ultimately, by learning from technical debt you can enhance technical excellence, product innovation, and customer satisfaction.

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5 Balance technical debt

The final step to manage technical debt is to balance it with your business value and stakeholder expectations. You can use the following principles to guide your technical debt decisions: avoiding unnecessary or avoidable technical debt by following good engineering practices, such as test-driven development, clean code, or design patterns; accepting creating necessary or strategic technical debt by making informed and transparent trade-offs; and reducing creating excessive or reckless technical debt by avoiding shortcuts, hacks, or workarounds that compromise product quality, security, or sustainability. By doing this, you can ensure that you deliver value to customers and stakeholders while maintaining a healthy development environment.

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Eder Rodrigues

Product Builder & Startup Mentor | ex-Nubank | Reforge | Platforms | FinTech
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Part of making informed and transparent trade-offs is to keep the whole team aware of product maturity. While building fast to test hypotheses it may be okay to hack and create a tech debt. Sometimes, creating isolated code that will be trashed is better to validate assumptions. The key is to keep everyone aligned on what's expected and agree about code quality and strategy for that specific feature.

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6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?

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How do you manage technical debt in a sprint?

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1 Identify technical debt

2 Plan technical debt

3 Track technical debt

4 Learn from technical debt

5 Balance technical debt

6 Here’s what else to consider

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