Great Big Agile: An OS for Agile Leaders

© Jeff Dalton 2019

Jeff DaltonGreat Big Agilehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-4206-3_66

66. Technical Debt

Jeff Dalton¹ 

(1)

Waterford, MI, USA

 

Description

Technical Debt is incurred when the agile team proactively determines that a less optimum, less efficient, or less robust solution is appropriate given constraints of time, budget, or resources. As this graphic from Martin Fowler describes, as technical debt increases, the costs and effort to continue development, or maintain an existing system, will become too high, and a “technical debt sprint” should be scheduled within a release to improve code quality.

The challenge for any Development Team is that:

• The business community likes technical debt due to short-term gains.

• The technical community ...