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Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Why Technical Debt Sucks

And I do mean sucks.  Technical Debt sucks at our energy, motivation and velocity. 

Technical Debt is a term that composes Defects, Shortcuts, Workarounds and other contributors to sub-par quality software.  Shortcuts in this case refer to intentionally writing code that quickly solves a problem.  While the problem itself is fixed, on average a shortcut also becomes a primary contributor to side-effects. 

Defects are something with which we are all familiar.  Carrying defects across sprints kills velocity.  I had to announce to our stakeholders today that, while our team has averaged 30 story points over the last 6 sprints we were only able to complete 14 story points this past sprint because we had 8 defects to fix some of which had a lifespan of a year.  There is nothing that should be more embarrassing to a team than to have to explain this. 

Short answer, run a sprint bug free. 

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