Technical debt is the consequence of poor or evolving software architecture and software development within a codebase. The debt can be thought of as work that needs to be done before a particular job can be considered complete. In this blog post, Bastian Buch proposes an agile approach to reduce technical debt. He first declares that technical debt hasn’t improve through agile development methods and principles, but only gained some visibility.
This is an interesting interview of Ward Cunningham that talks about technical debt. Ward Cunningham was the first to drew a comparison between technical complexity and debt in 1992. In this interview, he talks, amongst other topics, about the relationship between technical debt and developer experience or when accumulation of debt is a good thing.
How do you manage activities that don’t seem directly related to features in your Scrum sprints? This blog post discusses why it is a problem when Scrum teams start to wonder about having time to manage infrastructure, technical debt or test framework. For Johanna Rothman this is the sign that the culture is not Agile enough and that the product owner doesn’t want to take iteration time to schedule anything other than features in an iteration. She offers seven hints on how to improve this situation, saying that product owners that don’t want to fund technical debt will instead create more of it.
The nice metaphor of technical debt introduced some 18 years ago by Ward Cunningham has slowly taken roots in our collective conceptual toolbox, as a nice way to express some of the pains that software projects suffer from. Most software developers who have had some experience with significant, long-lived projects can feel it, sometimes point to it, but more than often can’t do much about it. In most cases, technical debt is seen as something very negative, burdening projects forever under increasing amount of interests. But some technical debt can be deliberate, more akin to borrowing to make an strategic investment, and this is especially the case for architectural-level debt.
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