Making Technical Debt Visible
4 steps to make it visible and the easy math to build the business case
As a Product Owner, there is nothing more frustrating than using valuable development time to deal with technical debt. We use the debt analogy to remind us of the imperative need to mitigate it, to keep our products scalable and sustainable. But it still seems difficult to communicate the value of refactoring to stakeholders primarily focused on customer-facing features. So, we often don’t talk about it. It’s like the first rule of Fight Club. Our business partners don’t want to acknowledge it, we get tired of delivering dire warnings, and the debt continues to accumulate. There comes a tipping point where it will start to affect the user experience negatively, and by then, you are in a real fight to stay ahead of losing customers.
If this sounds familiar, read on to explore how to persuade stakeholders that improving the product behind the scenes will allow your team to spend more time doing the work we all care about — giving our users features they love. And in the meantime, improve productivity, sustainability, and scalability.
Technical debt is defined, for this post, as “anything that impedes agility as a product matures.” Technical debt can be code-based, but it can also mean a lack of test automation and increasing DevOps issues.
Note: For the purposes of this post about making tech debt visible, we will not get into the strategies of solving it. For more in-depth references, visit Frances Lash’s article on managing technical debt or the valuable series on this topic on Scrum.org.
No matter how you define it, we can all agree that technical debt is a measurable risk and must be mitigated.
Data is Good, but Images are Better
If your goal is to connect with stakeholders effectively and show the impact that technical debt is causing, data tells a compelling story. And visualizing that data in meaningful ways creates an effect that can enable the development team and the business people to have a courageous conversation about spending time…
