Project management best practices: Technical debt summary

Updated . Posted . Visible to the public. Repeats.

Maintaining larger projects makes it more difficult to balance refactoring and upgrade tasks according to its actual value. Consider to create and periodically maintain a summary, which helps you and your team in the decision which refactoring task should be taken next.

Template

Here is an template on how you might categorize your tasks:

Technical debt Estimated Efforts Customer value Customer value explained Developer value Developer value explained
Short title for the task Score from 0-5 Score from 0-5 Explanation Score from 0-5 Explanation

Tip

Avoid generic phrases like "reduced future" or "speeds up future development" as explanation since they are true for nearly all tasks.

Side notes

  • Try to avoid adding too small tasks to this sheet (e.g. a tasks that can be done within a few hours) or tasks that are part of a story (e.g. continuing refactoring)
  • It protects yourself from prioritizing less important topics too high (e.g. we must now move from PostgreSQL to SQLite, when having a problem with PostgreSQL in the current story)
  • Using a table for this summary is just an example, you could also use your story board if it works for your team
  • The score 0-5 is just an example, you could also use t-shirt sizes (s, m, l, xl, xxl) or other measure units

Example

Technical debt Estimated Efforts Customer value Customer value explained Developer value Developer value explained
Add continuous integration in Gitlab 4 0 - 5 Dev machines are not blocked on test runs; Code Reviews include test badge; Automatically merge a PR on green tests
Upgrade Rails 5 0 - 5 New Rails features are accessible
Replace slider framework 4 4 New framework supports WCAG Compliance Level; Asset file size could be reduced 2 New slider library has a better API
Add capybara_lockstep 2 0 - 5 Reduce flaky integration tests
Last edit
Florian Leinsinger
License
Source code in this card is licensed under the MIT License.
Posted by Emanuel to makandra dev (2023-05-10 07:25)