What are the best decision-making strategies for technical debt in agile projects?

Technical debt is the same as financial debt and is managed in the same way -- make sure you pay it up, or you have less cash/resources to do what you want. If you don't manage and pay it with priority, like the financial debt, it will drive you to go bankrupt.

In my perspective, standard guiding principle we follow is to prioritize the resolution of issues that would pose significant barriers to our long-term value delivery. This definitely requires a continuous process of evaluation, where we categorize and prioritize our technical debt based on its potential impact on business operations and the stability of our underlying technology. When it comes to decision-making it is strategically aligned towards maximizing long-term value and benefits, with the understanding that short-term solutions often lead to the accumulation of technical debt. In certain situation, we have to make decision towards short-term for faster market with the understanding that we will balance in upcoming sprints.

Managing Tech Debt in agile delivery models needs to have dedicated capacity allocated at 15 to 20% in every sprint to ensure continuous tech debt mgmt is happening. Overall tech debt of more than 30% for your product foot print will inevitably slow your agile delivery down.

Technical debt has to managed well in time as the coat of debt increases in both aspects of cost of remedial action and also cost of risks realisation. Technical debt also prevents tou from updates in software and platform versions.

Train your product owners and scrum teams to consider technical debt in the same critical manner that they treat new functions and features. If the PO prioritizes work for the scrum team, it is he or she who must bring TD into the picture.

I firmly believe that addressing technical debt should be seamlessly integrated into agile project planning. It's essential to align technical debt repayment with other value-added projects to ensure that the software's quality and functionality continuously improve. Prioritization is key, allowing us to assess the impact of each debt item in the context of the project. This integrated approach ensures that technical debt reduction contributes to the overall project's success and doesn't remain a separate effort.

In my experience of projects management, we've learned that not all technical debt carries the same weight. Some might be a minor inconvenience, while others can significantly hinder progress. Drawing from our hands-on approach, we believe in classifying these debts based on their impact and urgency. By integrating them as user stories in our backlog, we ensure they're not sidelined but addressed in tandem with new features. This systematic approach, complete with acceptance criteria and estimates, allows us to strike a balance. We're not just firefighting; we're strategizing, ensuring that our projects remain agile, efficient, and of top-notch quality. It's this proactive planning that sets us apart and drives our commitment to excellence.

The impact of the Tech Debt is not always just Technical. We at Accion Labs have observed that the very first place Tech Debt hits is more often than not in the Data Layer. Unclean, inaccurate, inconsistent, disjointed data usually impacts all the layers and even if you wish to address UX / CX layer Tech Debt, you may not get desired results till you address the Data Layer. So, categorizing the KPIs by impact area is important and helps in prioritizing and alignment of the right resources. These impact categories are Business, Structural, Process, Data, and People.

Please add a dollar value and risk weight on the registered technical debt items and compare this with your feature based development plan. Present this to sponsor for decision.

Addressing technical debt needs to be planned like any other work as part of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). It requires a partnership between product and engineering teams to prioritize the impact of technical debt on the overall flexibility, stability and viability of the software solution as well as its impact on team performance.

It is, in my opinion, clearly the responsibility of the 'IT dept'/CIO/CTO to ensure that IT is being built responsibility and to balance short term delivery against long term maintenance/scaleability requirements. What I see a lot is teams treat Tech Debt the same way as other requirements and in terms of prioritisation/scheduling they effectively seek approval. While many stakeholders understand the need to control tech debt, most of them will prioritise short term value delivery. Making the argument that it is the right thing to do, will largely fall on deaf ears. So don't do it. The capacity available to stakeholders should be AFTER the IT organisation has determined what capacity needs to be reserved for reduction of technical debt.

We should consistently observe that technical debt isn't an isolated developer's concern; it resonates across the spectrum, impacting product owners, stakeholders, and even our end-users. Communication, for us, is the linchpin. We believe in transparently conveying the nuances of our technical debt, utilizing visual aids like dashboards to depict its status and trends. But it's not just about one-way communication. Collaboration is key. By integrating feedback mechanisms like retrospectives and demos, we foster a two-way dialogue, ensuring that every stakeholder has a voice in addressing and strategizing around technical debt. This collective approach helps driving our projects towards excellence.

Not every Tech Debt is caused by Code quality and not all Tech Debt is developer responsibility. As mentioned in previous section (Prioritize and Plan Repayment), we focus on the Tech Debt Impact areas and KPIs aligned to it. Measuring in this way, effectively enables mapping and aligning right stakeholders across the value chain. For example, a Tech Debt impact area of "Business" with related KPIs like Usability etc will map to Business / CX stakeholders and communication flow through to other roles up to developer. Besides the overall communication and collaboration should be enabled through Architecture Governance and Change Management mechanism which by default brings all the apsects of dashboards and decision making.

Collaboration includes working with cross functional teams and customers to understanding the impact of technical debt on customer satisfaction, time to market and total cost of ownership. It is important to be able to correlate technical debt to these factors and to provide metrics on its impact. For example, to be able to quantify the cost of technical debt on engineering such as increased headcount, increased engineering effort to work around tech debt, and impact to revenue due to longer feature delivery times or missed customer commitments. Being able to quantify the impact of technical debt financially during planning cycles is an important tool for helping stakeholders recognize the importance of paying it down.

Foster open communication about technical debt within the team and with stakeholders to ensure a shared understanding of its implications. Collaboration in decision-making processes helps in balancing technical debt resolution with new feature development, ensuring team alignment and stakeholder buy-in.

Absolutely, technical debt, in our experience, has been a profound learning catalyst. While it presents challenges, it also unveils opportunities to refine our methodologies. Each debt encountered is a mirror, reflecting areas for enhancement. By conducting thorough root cause analyses, we unearth the underlying triggers, allowing us to preempt similar issues in the future. Impact analysis, on the other hand, offers a holistic view of the broader implications, guiding our strategic decisions. It's not merely about addressing the present debt; it's about evolving our practices. This iterative learning ensures that we're not just reacting but proactively steering our projects towards a path of continuous improvement and excellence

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." In order to ensure that we are learning and improving, we have to track the recurrence of technical debt. I've seen many organizations get stuck here. The learning process requires more than just prioritization and planning, it requires that we spend the time to understand how we acquired that debt.

Technical debt should be factored into any agile methodology that assumes an iterative development process. As products evolve, mature and expand over time, tech debt is inevitable. In the past tech debt required refactoring a codebase. Now, tech debt might manifest as APIs or services that need to be deprecated or replaced with new components in order to address current requirements. Not all engineering work is greenfield. Often times engineering is brownfield where the old must be changed or removed to make room for the new.

Analyze the causes of technical debt to learn from past mistakes and improve future practices. Implementing improved coding standards, design patterns, and refactoring techniques can prevent the accumulation of similar debt in future projects.

Refactoring should be a regular part of tasks during sprint planning and backlog grooming sessions. Educating stakeholders about technical debt and its implications on the project's long-term success will help timely resolution before they become critical problems. PM should clearly communicate the trade-offs between addressing technical debt vs delivering new features to manage expectations. Turnovers, changing priorities, lack of governance are important contributors to technical debt in agile environments. Automated testing, code analysis, and continuous integration to catch and address issues early in the development lifecycle will be remedy to against those factors in some extent.

Based on my experience, technical debt often remains unaddressed until it becomes a critical issue, sometimes prompting a complete rewrite. To mitigate this, the primary objective should be to minimize the accumulation of technical debt from the outset. Effective sprint planning and a robust solution architecture are essential. Implementing rigorous processes, such as architectural reviews, code reviews, and test-driven development, can significantly curb the buildup. Still, some technical debt is inevitable. It's crucial to document these debts in backlogs meticulously and consistently review and prioritize them for resolution. Secondly allocate a percent of time during sprints for tech debt remedy so they get resolved at a steady pace

Technical debt is a cross-functional issue, so it's key to involve all stakeholders in the decision-making process. This includes developers, POs/PMs, and business leaders. Also, it's important to be transparent about technical debt. This means communicating the risks and rewards of the debt to all stakeholders, and keeping them updated on your progress in repaying the debt. Balance the need to deliver new features with the need to reduce technical debt. This is a delicate balance, but it is important to make sure that you are not accumulating too much technical debt, or it will eventually start to impact your ability to deliver new features. And this is a fact: Not all technical debt needs to be addressed immediately. So, Prioritize.

Some technical debts such as outdated technologies or end of life support for platforms can cause security concerns for applications and need to be continuously addressed too.

usually technical debt is a trade off to gain certain agility and flexibility. Thus it is a balance act. to lower excessive debt the middle to long term planning and thorough architecture design should be implemented and reviewed continuously. then based on project's situation to make a choice on the speed or robust. And the project need to consider broader context in the enterprise and in the business.