As a Product Owner, there is nothing more frustrating than having to use valuable development time to deal with technical debt. Like death and taxes, it’s just never a good time when those lurking defects decide to unravel.
We all know it is imperative to keep our products scalable and sustainable, but it is difficult to sell the idea of an upgrade or technical product time to stakeholders who are primarily focused on customer-facing features.
Persuade your stakeholders that time improving the product behind the scenes will increase productivity, sustainability, and scalability.
I’m going to pause a moment here to open up the definition of technical debt for this post. For the purposes of this post about making tech debt visible, we will not get into the strategies of solving for it.
Technical debt is defined, in this post, as “anything that impedes agility as a product matures.” Technical Debt certainly could be code-based, but it could also mean a lack of test automation and DevOps issues.
Technical debt is NOT undone work. Undone work, in contrast to technical debt, goes into the Product Backlog.
For more in-depth references, visit Frances Lash’s article on managing technical debt or the valuable series on this topic on Scrum.org . In short, no matter your definition, we can all agree, technical debt is a measurable risk, and must be mitigated.
Read on here to find out how to connect with stakeholders in a more influential way and show the impact that technical debt is causing.
USE IMAGES
Data tells a compelling story, but helping stakeholders visualize data in meaningful ways creates an impact that trumps any speech, email or table. My favorite technique is this four-step solution introduced to me by Professional Scrum Trainer Ryan Ripley:
1) Start with a standard sprint burn-down with an ideal line. It’s not an official element of Scrum, but it can be a valuable technique for the Development Team to visualize progress towards the Sprint Goal. If you are not using an agile tool that creates this chart for you, this can be modeled in Excel.
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