Technical Debt
The future cost and effort created by postponing necessary work earlier in the product life cycle.
Key Points
- Represents future rework and expense that accrues when teams delay needed work or accept shortcuts.
- Can be deliberate to meet a deadline or unintentional due to poor design, lack of standards, or insufficient testing.
- Should be made visible, estimated, and prioritized in the backlog alongside features and defects.
- Manage it by refactoring regularly, automating tests, improving architecture, and tightening the Definition of Done to prevent new debt.
Example
To hit a release date, a team skips test automation and hard-codes configurations. In later sprints, they spend extra time adding automated tests, cleaning the code, and fixing bugs. That extra effort is the cost created by earlier postponement of work.
PMP Example Question
During a sprint, the team defers writing performance tests to meet a milestone, planning to add them in a future iteration. What does this decision most directly create?
- Technical debt
- Schedule buffer
- Scope creep
- Change request
Correct Answer: A — Technical debt
Explanation: Deferring necessary work introduces a future cost to complete it and address resulting issues.
