Agile Programming

For systems with a lot of technical debt problems, it’s not uncommon to spend 20-50% of on-going development time toward repaying that debt. Obviously that has an impact on project schedules. The risk, however, of ignoring these problems is sudden and impactful failures, perhaps in production. Work focused on technical debt needs to be prioritized and part of the project plan. By chipping away at technical debt in a long-term fashion, it is possible to reduce the risk of catastrophic production failures, improve the morale of developers, and ultimately speed up development on legacy systems.

The decision to incur technical debt should be a conscious one.. However, unrealistic time tables and feature pressure often force a team to cut corners. There may be valid reasons to take technical shortcuts, but that decision should reside with the PM/PO, not the engineers building the product. Decisions about product quality should always sit with the individual(s) making scope, schedule, and resource decisions.

My company has written a white paper on this which you can review at here .

Posted: October 25th, 2011 under Agile ALM, Agile Programming, Scrum.
Comments: 4

Building and maintaining a Product Backlog can be a time-consuming effort. Though the Product Owner has final say in the prioritization, a good product backlog is a result of a combined effort of the entire team – Product Owner, Scrum team, ScrumMaster and stakeholders.

One expert in this area is CollabNet Certified Scrum Trainer Angela Druckman. Ms. Druckman will be hosting a webinar focusing on techniques and ideas for improving the overall effectiveness of backlog management.

The webinar will be held on Monday October 27, 2011 at 11:00 am pacific time. You can register at the CollabNet website www.collab.net – www.collab.net

Posted: October 13th, 2011 under Agile ALM, Agile Programming, Scrum, Uncategorized.
Comments: none