Technical debt

What is Technical debt?

Technical debt is not bug. It is that the feature can work, but it is not a perfect/clean solution. It may take a big problem for future development. So, it is necessary to refactor it during the development. Basically, it need to reserve some sprint or some percentage of sprint to perform this task. The experience data is about 20% of total development, e.g.  1 of 5 sprints. 

 

Actually, I have occurred lots of tech debt special for legacy code. There are lots of code written 10 or 20 years ago, mostly are C source code. Now I want to touch it, like fix a bug, add a new feature. It will be very difficult, because the code less of extensibility, readability, no unit test. One small feature modification may cause a whole system test. We pay for the tech debt after so many years. 

 

Following is a paper in linkedin, it is clear.

http://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tech-debt-simplified-lindsay-chung