Comment équilibrez-vous la dette technique et les nouvelles fonctionnalités dans un sprint ?

In my experience, it's essential to establish a quota for addressing technical debt. Otherwise, new product features may dominate the sprint, consistently pushing technical debt tasks aside once the sprint is underway. Regrettably, during prioritization, tasks related to technical debt often lose out to new feature tasks. Additionally, within each quota, tasks must be prioritized, ensuring that product-related tasks compete only with other product tasks.

Huge fan of working with Dev Teams and Product Owners to assess tech debt via complexity and business value. Dev teams should own the understanding of Complexity, while PO/stakeholders own the understanding of Business Value. The collaborative rating assessment overlays each respective Tech Debt item in 2x2 matrix and prioritizes the remaining work into quadrants of Now, Next, Never, and As Time Permits. This sets priorities and goals for the team on a PI, or Features when tackling Tech Debt

In my opinion balancing technical debt and new features in a sprint requires careful prioritization and collaboration. Start by evaluating the impact of technical debt on the product's long-term health and team productivity. Work with the Product Owner to prioritize debt alongside new features, ensuring critical issues are addressed without stalling progress. Allocate a portion of each sprint to debt resolution, preventing it from accumulating. Communicate the benefits of reducing debt to stakeholders, highlighting how it improves stability, performance, and future feature development. This balanced approach ensures sustainable growth while maintaining product quality and team efficiency.

The Product Owner and development team must strike a balance between addressing technical debt and introducing new features. For instance, during sprint planning, the team might allocate a portion of their capacity 20%—to tackle technical debt, such as refactoring code or improving documentation. This ensures that your codebase remains healthy and manageable. The remaining 80% can be dedicated to developing new features that add value to users. By regularly reviewing and adjusting this balance, much like a gardener assessing the needs of their plants, the team can ensure that both immediate business goals and long-term sustainability are met.

By assessing the impact and urgency of technical debt and new features, teams can make informed decisions to balance these priorities effectively within a sprint. This approach ensures that the team maintains a sustainable pace of development while addressing critical issues and delivering value to stakeholders.

The allocation of time and resources should be a collaborative effort. In practice, I've found that it's beneficial to involve the development team in estimating the effort required to address technical debt. This not only ensures that the team has a say in the allocation but also increases their commitment to addressing technical debt. However, it's essential to strike a balance and avoid allocating too much time to technical debt at the expense of delivering new features, as this can frustrate stakeholders

By strategically allocating time and resources to address technical debt and implement new features within sprints, teams can achieve a balance that ensures the long-term health of the project while delivering value to stakeholders in a timely manner.

This approach ensures that the team prioritizes new features while still addressing technical debt. However, it is essential to evaluate each item's individual requirements to ensure that the allocated time and resources are appropriate. Effective time and resource allocation can lead to a productive sprint and a well-maintained codebase in the long run.

I try to allocate some percentage of time each sprint for each development team for tech debt. Though there's type of tech debt that requires essentially more effort. These tech debts are going to roadmap planning and are prioritized and planned in quarterly roadmaps along with other product or business features.

Allocating time and resources to balance technical debt and new features in a sprint requires careful planning and collaboration between the Scrum Master, Product Owner, and development team.Prioritize technical debt based on its impact on system stability, performance, and future development. Categorize it into critical, medium, and low priority.Review the team’s average velocity (story points or hours) from previous sprints to understand how much work they can typically complete in a sprint. Include technical debt tasks as backlog items, with clear descriptions and acceptance criteria. These should be prioritized alongside new features.

When planning communications consider what can be automated and shared via dashboards or email, and what needs active participation and thus a call. Limiting unnecessary calls, and keeping them short by sharing information first, limits time-wasting and call- burnout, especially in fully remote teams working in diverse timezones. It is also crucial to remember than different team members have different learning styles, some understand written text better, others benefit from audio or video etc. To be inclusive balance various means of communication.

I feel we should reserve calls for interactive discussions. Minimize unnecessary calls, share info beforehand, and keep them brief. Consider diverse learning styles to ensure inclusive communication, vital for remote teams in different timezones.

These tools and techniques can help ensure that the team is working efficiently, and that everyone is working towards the same goal. By communicating and collaborating effectively, the team can balance technical debt and new features, delivering high-quality software that meets the needs of the customer.

Regularly update the team and stakeholders on goals, progress, and feedback, fostering a collective problem-solving approach. Leverage tools like daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, and user stories to enhance communication and collaboration within the team.

The effectiveness of our communication and collaboration approach lies at the core of achieving swift problem resolution, rapid development, and successful delivery. By fostering open lines of communication within the team and with stakeholders, we ensure a quick exchange of ideas and information. Leveraging various agile meetings and communication channels facilitates rapid collaboration, enabling us to address challenges promptly and deliver value in a timely manner. This proactive communication strategy not only expedites development processes but also enhances the overall success of our deliveries, establishing a foundation for sustained efficiency and value creation

Constantly monitor and adapt the sprint plan and execution to optimize outcomes. Utilize metrics like velocity, burndown charts, defect rates, and customer satisfaction scores to gauge performance. Make informed adjustments based on data, feedback, and continuous learning. Agile testing methodologies can also contribute to refining the sprint approach.

Without these steps, it is impossible to ensure that the team is on track and delivering high-quality products. By monitoring performance, quality, and satisfaction, the team can identify areas for improvement and make adjustments accordingly. By using these tools, the team can track progress and identify any issues that arise. Adjusting the plan based on the data and feedback received will help ensure that the team delivers a high-quality product on time and within budget.

From my perspective , burnup chart is the most effective metric to measure sprint progress Burnup chart demos remaining story points , Scope changes , Sprint Velocity , Increment , indicator to team harmony

Monitor progress closely and adjust priorities based on the team’s capacity and project needs. Start by dedicating a portion of the sprint to address critical technical debt, ensuring it doesn’t accumulate and hinder future development. Simultaneously, include new features to keep the product evolving and aligned with user needs. Regularly review the impact of both aspects during sprint planning and daily stand-ups, and be prepared to adjust the balance based on feedback and emerging issues. This iterative approach helps maintain a healthy codebase while delivering valuable new functionalities.

In my experience, conducting regular retrospectives is crucial for continuous improvement. These sessions help teams reflect on their processes, identify areas for optimization, and implement changes that can significantly reduce lead time. A strategy I recommend is to use data-driven decision making. By tracking key metrics like cycle time and throughput, teams can make informed adjustments to their processes, focusing efforts on the most impactful areas for lead time reduction.

This is just a generic description of Learn & Improve. There is no specific information as to how to apply it to the problem of technical debt.

Learning and improving also means learning the source / cause of technical debt and building the reduction (or the avoidance where possible) of technical debt in the development process. This can contribute to having less technical debt in the first place.

It is usually the entire scrum team who determine what goes into the sprint. While the product owner might be tempted to bring in functional stories only, the scrum master can help coach and help the team negotiate how technical debts will cause the customers to move away from the product I would advocate capacity allocation each sprint for functional stories, tech enablers, tech debts etc The percentages could be what the team agrees to

Prioritize addressing critical technical debt that impacts performance or maintainability alongside new feature development. Allocate a portion of each sprint specifically for refactoring and resolving technical debt, while using retrospectives to identify and implement process improvements. This approach ensures sustainable development, enhances code quality and supports the delivery of valuable new features.

One thing I've found helpful is dedicating a fixed percentage of sprint capacity to technical debt. This approach allows for continuous improvement without compromising the delivery of new features. By involving the team in prioritizing technical debt alongside features, we ensure that the most impactful issues are addressed. This fosters a sense of ownership and balance within the team. Additionally, making technical debt visible in sprint planning highlights its importance. This transparency helps maintain product quality while still meeting business objectives for new development.

Balancing technical debt with new features requires a strategic approach, emphasizing impact and resource allocation. In my experience, prioritizing tasks based on urgency and potential for stakeholder value is key. Utilizing MVPs has been effective in delivering incremental value while managing technical debt. Regular communication and collaboration within the team are vital for adjusting priorities. This method fosters a culture of continuous improvement and learning, crucial for agile environments. By focusing on delivering stakeholder value and maintaining a flexible, iterative approach, we've managed to achieve a sustainable balance between innovation and maintaining a robust, efficient codebase.

To succeed, balance and deliver by prioritizing tasks, efficient resource management, and adapting plans as needed. Regularly assess progress, communicate effectively, and foster collaboration within the team. I think this approach guarantees a successful project delivery.

+ Meet or Exceed Expectations: Focus on delivering value to stakeholders by meeting or exceeding their expectations for the features developed within the sprint. + Minimum Viable Product (MVP): Consider using the MVP approach to quickly deliver a core set of functionalities while identifying areas for future improvement. This allows you to address technical debt later in the development lifecycle. + Other Strategies: Pair programming, code reviews, automated testing, and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) can all help improve code quality and reduce technical debt over time.

Balancing technical debt and new features in a sprint involves prioritizing both based on their impact on the product's long-term value and immediate goals. SM should facilitate discussions with the team and stakeholders to assess the urgency and risk of technical debt versus the need for new features. By incorporating a mix of both into the sprint backlog, ensuring that the technical debt does not compromise the quality and maintainability of the product, while still delivering valuable new functionality, we achieve a balanced approach. Regularly revisiting and reassessing these priorities during sprint planning and reviews helps maintain this balance effectively.

Start off by identifying what is of most value to stakeholders and then understand which technical debt items can provide the most value in terms of impact in delivering the features required.Keep a healthy ratio of 'Features :Technical Debt' in iterations and constantly tweak the ratio till the technical debts are covered.In my experience often enough a 60:40 or 70:30 ratio of features to technical debt helps to constantly keep delivering business value while cleaning up technical debts.This method will ensure stakeholder priorities are achieved while also achieving required technical scaling/improvements paralelly.

Every 5 or 6 sprint there should be a refactoring sprint in which to recover technical debt. A strong scrum master should explain this to the product owner and also factor in the velocity into the burn down chart

Technical Debt (TD) needs to be actively managed and monitored, however, it is always better to prevent it from happening. Tips to prevent TD: 1-Design Before Code, 2-Implement Peer Code Review & Product Owner Review 3- Define best practices & standards for development e 4-Define a Definition Of Done according to best practices 5-Allocate Sprint resources to perform Quality Assurance 6-Keep TD documented 7-Perform Design Reviews 8-Try Per Programming

To avoid piling up excessive technical debt, in my opinion, it is important to first do the technical design and get it reviewed by the lead/architect and also include code test coverage, code review, sonar code smells etc accounted into the Definition of Done of a user story. In this way, there won't be an excessive pile of technical debt created to refactor.

1. Understand and Identify the areas of existing technical debt. 2. Analyze the functional areas which might be impacted due to the changes of those. 3. Plan to reserve time in the sprint where this can be taken up. Ensure the impacted areas are tested thoroughly. 4. For the new developments ensure code review is getting conducted and we are not piling up with new issues on technical debt front.

Lo que me ha funcionado es: - Determinar el porcentaje del sprint backlog que se va a dedicar a la deuda técnica (máximo 30%, si se requiere más posiblemente otro equipo deba hacerse cargo, o darle foco en el equipo hasta que el desarrollo sea "predecible" y "fluido") - priorizar la deuda por relación impacto vs esfuerzo - constantemente invitar al equipo a mejorar sus prácticas de desarrollo y monitorear la deuda técnica