Discussion - Topic: Tracking health over debt

This week's topic: Tracking health over debt

As described in Thoughtworks Technology Radar Vol. #28.

Tracking technical debt is a perennial topic in software delivery organizations. What is technical debt and what is not? How do you prioritize it? And most importantly, how do you express the value of paying it off to your internal stakeholders? Following the Agile Manifesto’s manner of reasoning — “while there is value in the item on the right, we value the item on the left more” — we like the idea of tracking health over debt. The folks at REA in Australia share a good example of what such health tracking can look like. They track system ratings in the categories of development, operations and architecture.

Focusing on health instead of debt is a more constructive framing. It connects a team to the ultimate value of reducing debt and helps them prioritize it. Every piece of tackled technical debt should ideally be connectable to one of the agreed expectations. Teams should treat the health rating the same as other service-level objectives (SLOs) and prioritize improvements whenever they drop out of the “green zone” for a given category.

Zoom link will be added just before the event starts.

Discussion Resources :

What is the Agile Manifesto? by Paul Kirvan and Mary K. Pratt
https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/definition/Agile-Manifesto

Redefining Technical Debt: Tracking Health Over Debt by Sai Teja Gangapuram
https://levelup.gitconnected.com/redefining-technical-debt-prioritizing-software-health-b884a5e1b70b

How to track -- and measure -- technical debt by Stephen J. Bigelow
https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/tip/How-to-track-and-measure-technical-debt

How to track and prioritize technical debt by Millie Macdonald
https://www.tiny.cloud/blog/technical-debt-tracking/

Tips and Tricks for Measuring and Improving Technical Debt Metrics by Kateryna Kril
https://www.mavensolutions.tech/blog/metrics-for-technical-debt/