How does technical debt impact Agile estimation and planning?

Undocumented debt leads to underestimating by hiding rework. Accumulating debt increases uncertainty and variance, undermining reliable planning. Deferred refactoring debt slows velocity as code quality declines. Prioritizing features over debt pay down inflates estimates and timelines. Unmonitored debt causes brittle code that's hard to change without side effects. Evaluating debt levels and addressing top areas provides more accurate estimates. Factoring in debt repayment work enables sustainable pacing. Leveraging velocity trend analysis minimizes debt impact on forecasts. Making debt visible, quantifying its cost, and prioritizing reduction allows better planning. Ignoring debt causes unpredictable output and delays.

Technical debt complicates agile estimation and planning by introducing hidden complexities and uncertainties that may not be evident during initial assessments. It underscores the importance of regularly addressing technical debt to maintain a sustainable development pace and realistic planning. Having the teams inspect the DoD is inevitable to avoid weaker code getting deployed. Focussing on modern engineering practices and using tools like sonarcube can help teams to improve on technical debt and improve estimation and planning.

Technical debt in Agile can complicate estimation and planning by introducing uncertainty and potential delays. When a team accrues technical debt, it may result in slower development, increased likelihood of defects, and reduced flexibility in adapting to changes. Estimating tasks becomes challenging because the hidden complexities of addressing technical debt may not be immediately apparent. This can lead to inaccurate estimates and planning that doesn't account for the true effort required. Mitigating technical debt should be a consideration in Agile processes to maintain sustainable development pace and accurate planning.

It can make it far more political, especially for lower maturity organisations. One must ask if the estimations and planning for your product will tackle any existing debt, avoid creating new debt, or simply build on existing, and potentially add to the problem. It is quite simply a question of risk and nothing more complicated. Tech debt is no different to financial debt in many regards. ‘Some’ is probably not a bad thing, so long as the value you derive from having it is ‘worth it’. Striving to be totally debt free is likely folly and not an effective use of resources. Managing the balance is the key, not trying to fully avoid it.

Technical debt is oftentimes invisible during the development of initial features and in most cases, arise either due to tight deadlines and/or due to the less average experience of the team in the technology or domain. It bites back in the future when the team has to constantly refactor and rebuild parts of the code to incorporate newer features that were unclear or not thought of initially.

Technical debt can generally be tackled by having members on the team who can identify patterns that can choke development in the future and allocate adequate time during estimation, for a feature to be built in an extensible way, rather than just hacking it together to meet deadlines.

Even with the best planning, technical debt can still occur. In such cases, the debt can be estimated separately to see what all it affects and if the debt itself grows with time or not. Combining the effort for technical debt along with feature development is a common way it's handled and it leads to the debt being hidden and the management not understanding why a relatively small feature requires more time. Instead, technical debt should be called out as-and-when it is visible and should be addressed separately. If done properly, the benefits of the same can be projected better in the future, and improvements can be attributed to the removal of the debt, thereby creating a sustainable pace of development in the long term.

Technical debt can appear in forms that many people don’t expect. There is often a belief that tech debt solely relates to code quality, and that test coverage or security compliance can ensure a product has no tech debt. Of course, all technology experiences a natural degradation due to the world moving around it, causing aspects of a build to become outdated or insecure. But, vast amounts of tech debt arise from building processes or experiences into the product that will “do for now” without understanding that anything which constrains a user, creates dependencies, or limits product adoption, amongst other factors, is a debt that will need to be paid at some point. The code could be compliant, but it lacks effectiveness.

Underestimation of Future Workload - Technical debt often leads to a significant underestimation of the effort required for future development tasks. It creates hidden complexities and dependencies, which can unexpectedly increase the workload, disrupting sprint planning and timelines. Compromised Velocity and Predictability - Accumulated technical debt can severely impact the team's velocity, making it difficult to predict future performance accurately. This unpredictability hinders effective planning and estimation in Agile environments, as teams struggle to gauge the time needed to address both new features and existing debt.