Managing Technical Debt in an Agile Project

Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.

  Agile   Cost Management   Quality   Risk Management   Testing/Test Management  

Do you have a product owner who doesn’t want to admit to technical debt? “Give me another feature! And another feature! Just keep giving me features! It’s feature time, baby!” Once a product owner has the heady feeling of seeing features one after the other, it’s difficult for that product owner to consider anything other than features in an agile project.

I can understand when a product owner wants features first. But if you are working on a legacy product, you have technical debt. The product owner must also rank technical debt. But some product owners have “feature-itis”, an inability to see the technical debt. If you have a product owner like that, you will work with both the project team and the product owner to manage the technical debt.

Because any project team who doesn’t manage its current and legacy technical debt will eventually discover that it is impossible to produce features. It’s a slippery slope. Here’s what an agile project manager can do to work with a project team and a product owner.

Help the Project Team Avoid Any Current Technical Debt
As a team produces features, the team must discuss what “done” means so it doesn’t incur any current technical debt. It must address architecture debt, design debt, test debt…any kind of technical debt it can imagine. A …

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