Bankrupt tech debt

Problem

There is a board which is a graveyard of tech debt tickets.
Nobody knows what is in there and what it is important to work on.

Context

  • The tech debt board is shared across multiple teams
  • Whenever tech debt is recognized, a new ticket is added to the board and forgotten
  • Cyclically, some engineer tries to organize and prioritize the board, but soon it becomes stale again
  • All engineers are responsible, which means nobody is responsible

Solution

  • Each engineer picks one tech debt ticket and champions it to completion within the next 2 weeks
  • Declare bankruptcy on the tech debt board, as in: delete it and forget about it
  • From now on, when planning a new initiative, any relevant tech debt is identified and worked on as part of the initiative itself

When to work on tech debt

Tech debt can be tackled before, during or after the go-live of an initiative: it does not matter.
What matters is that a new initiative cannot start until all tech debt of the previous one has been covered

Tech debt vs deadlines

It is fine to create new tech debt to respect a deadline. However, the tech debt must be recouped before starting a new initiative

How much tech debt

Perfect is enemy of good: we do not need to completely remove all the tech debt related to an initiative.
However, after an initiative is completed, we need to be in a better state than before starting it.
If the remaining tech debt is relevant, it will soon pop up again as part of a new initiative

Important tech debt can't be lost

Do not fear to lose track of important tech debt because of declaring bankruptcy.
If a piece of tech debt is important, it will be evident as part of the analysis of a new initiative

Tech debt is not tech work

An initiative can be either product work or tech work.
Tech work is what is needed to keep systems operational, not matter if they are customer-facing or internal.
So tech work not tech debt, and it should be delivered mixed with product work through any given interval of time (e.g. 80/20 product/tech work split)

Discarded solutions

Quarter tech debt

Here tech debt is bankrupted at the end of each quarter.
We are back to the original problem. However, by setting an expiration date on, we do not cumulate stale tech debt forever.
This might be a good intermediate step before adopting the proposed solution

Tech debt board kept up to date

There is a recurring meeting where all engineers or at least the tech leads go through the tech debt board and prioritize it.
This approach is very expensive in terms of time and cognitive load as the board keeps growing through time.
This is better than just having a graveyard tech board where nobody is responsible.
However, the lack of an expiration date makes it an ever-increasing burden for the responsible engineers.