Timeline for How can I quantify the amount of technical debt that exists in a project?
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| Feb 20, 2012 at 20:07 | comment | added | Erik Dietrich | That makes sense. And, certainly, what I'm looking to get to is making a (somewhat) objective case to say something like "in one year, we can develop X new features if we just keep plowing ahead, but X+Y new features if we pay off some of this technical debt". | |
| Feb 20, 2012 at 19:42 | comment | added | Matthew Flynn | @Erik Dietrich - Well, the TD is definitely adding complexity to the solution. The difficulty may be that fixing TD piecemeal may be more costly than a wholesale solution. Thus it might be that you have 3 stories that would be rated at 5 each if the the TD was eliminated, but are 8 each with the debt in place--so that adds up to 9 points of TD. The task to fix the TD as a whole (irrespective of stories) may actually be an 8. So you can argue that the wholesale solution costs less (8) than the piecemeal(9). This would be part of the negotiation | |
| Feb 20, 2012 at 19:33 | comment | added | Erik Dietrich | So, in the context of story points, is it fair to say that you could add a few points to each story if there was a high degree of technical debt represented by the affected areas of the code? That is, if story X involves adding to code element Y, which is just awful, you tack on a few points to the story specifically because of the nature of Y? And that number of points is the same as or related to the number of points to perform the fix that you mentioned estimating? | |
| Feb 20, 2012 at 19:29 | history | answered | Matthew Flynn | CC BY-SA 3.0 |