© 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 ...

Get Great Big Agile: An OS for Agile Leaders now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.