Understanding the impact of technical debt on the capacity and velocity of teams and organizations: viewing team and organization capacity as a portfolio of real options
Understanding the impact of technical debt is critical
to understanding a team’s velocity. For organizations with
multiple teams and products, the impact of technical debt
combines non-linearly to impact the organization’s velocity. We
can think of the capacity of a team as a portfolio. Not all of that
capacity can be invested in new features or defect fixing, without
incurring negative consequences. A portion of the team’s capacity
needs to be invested in the ongoing management and reduction of
technical debt. This paper describes a simple technique for
visualizing, quantifying and tracking a team’s technical debt as a
portion of their overall capacity investment. The knowledge and
insights gained through this technique help with better capacity
planning, improved forecasting, and helps to justify the business
case for investing in managing and reducing technical debt.
History
Publication
Fourth International Workshop on Managing Technical Debt (MTD 2013), in conjunction with International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2013);pp. 28-31