My teammate Nanda Lankalapalli and I have an article in StickyMinds on how we use technical debt sprints to keep our technical debt to a manageable level. There are lots of approaches to managing technical debt – what works for your team?
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4 comments on “Technical Debt Sprints”
Hi Lisa,
Did you see this old article of me?
http://www.hanoulle.be/2010/04/cleaning-a-kitchen-a-good-metaphor-for-refactoring/
Hi Yves, yes, I saw that back when you published it, I love that metaphor and I often give people the link to your post. We’ve always been keen on refactoring and managing our technical debt, but it’s good for us to have reminders to step up our game on it.
Back in the day when I was at Microsoft on Windows, we used an approach called “Milestone 0”. The idea is similar, except that we dedicated an entire milestone (maybe up to 3 months) just to “cleaning house”: closing bugs that didn’t reproduce, automating tests we didn’t get around to automating, cleaning up the code. Basically it was all about technical debt. This has become a practice I recommend to every team I join after, and I’m glad to see an analog in the Agile world.
Thanks, Mark, it’s interesting to know about other approaches. We get technical debt whether we’re waterfall, agile or something else!