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Successfully Balancing Technical Debt with New Functionality

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Product Management Insights Leadership

Balancing technical debt (a.k.a. code debt) with new functionality is a common challenge in software development. It requires strategic planning, thoughtful decision-making, and clear, consistent communications with all stakeholders – from product owners and project managers to UI / UX designers and back-end engineers. Here’s the process the Revelry team uses to help assure this balance:

Assess and Categorize Technical Debt

  1. Identify existing tech debt
  2. Categorize each debt by impact (e.g. performance, security, maintainability)
  3. Estimate the “interest” each debt item accrues over time

Prioritize New Functionality

  1. Align desired functionality with business goals and user needs
  2. Estimate the value and urgency of new features

Educate All Stakeholders

  1. Communicate the impact of tech debt on long-term productivity
  2. Illustrate how debt reduction enables faster feature delivery

Create a Balanced Backlog and Decide on Debt Limits

  1. Mix debt-reduction tasks with new feature development. NOTE: Prioritize debt that poses the highest risk to the system and balance quick wins with long-term architectural improvements
  2. Establish thresholds for acceptable levels of tech debt
  3. Create alerts for if / when debt exceeds these limits

Allocate Resources Strategically

  1. Dedicate a percentage of development time to debt reduction
  2. If you use sprints, consider rotating “improvement sprints” focused on debt

Integrate Debt Reduction into Feature Work

  1. Refactor related code when adding new features
  2. Use feature flags to gradually replace old code

Plan for the Long Term, Measure, and Monitor

  1. Create a roadmap that includes both new features and debt reduction; regularly reassess and adjust the balance
  2. Track metrics related to code quality and development speed
  3. Use these metrics to justify debt-reduction efforts

Leverage Automation

  1.  Implement continuous integration / continuous deployment (CI/CD)
  2.  Use static code analysis tools to help prevent new debt

Foster a Quality -Focused Culture

  1. Encourage developers to speak up about technical issues
  2. Reward efforts to improve code quality and reduce debt

Need help managing technical debt? Let’s connect. We love this stuff.

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