Kamal Hinduja Geneva Switzerland : How do you deal with technical debt in Scrum?

A few ideas:

1. Educate your team about clean code practices and the pitfalls of tech debt
2. Invest in tool a like Sonar to help the Devs  
3. Ensure your product has a Definition of Done to ensure tech debt is being captured and eliminated
4. If you already have it, make it transparent on the Product Backlog and pay it back over time

If someone is putting pressure on the team to cut corners to meet a release date, educate them on the dangers of tech debt and how that can backfire.

Aim for a 3 part strategy:

1. Plug the hole with a Definition of Done that truly reflects what "usable" means, and honor it from this point forward. This will stop more technical debt from being accrued. You'll be good and true from this point on and will have Product Increments you can have confidence in.
2. Quantify the technical debt incurred so far in the Product Backlog. The Product Backlog must tell the truth at all times about how much work is currently believed to remain for the Product over its lifetime, including any technical debt.
3. Come up with an appropriate policy for paying off technical debt Sprint by Sprint (e.g. spend X% of time each Sprint repaying it). Remember to allow for any losses due to context switching for capacity planning purposes.

The best way to deal with technical debt is to prevent as much as possible. I like to refer to the Technical Debt Quadrants. The reckless forms of technical debt can be avoided by ensuring there is time for the team to learn, experiment, and deliver high-quality work. However, there are still instances where taking on some technical debt is beneficial, such as delivering something before it loses its value. In other cases, the passage of time leads to technical debt as the environment around the team changes.

When you do have technical debt, I've found two techniques that work well.

Sometimes, paying down technical debt can be paired with completing other, related Product Backlog Items. The "Boy Scout Rule", or leaving the system in a better state than you found it, is often a good practice. This approach is more effective for small, targeted changes that reduce technical debt.

I also recommend that teams put work to pay down technical debt as Product Backlog Items. This encourages the team to consider the value of paying down technical debt to other stakeholders. If the team can clearly express the value of doing the work to a business stakeholder, customer, or user, it can be ordered by the Product Owner and completed when it makes sense. Perhaps it'll become related to a future Sprint or Product Goal and would be valuable then.

The above are all excellent, but just to add here an alternative view if I may. Technical debt refers to working code that’s written in a sub-optimal way, often due to time pressures or intentional trade-offs. While this code meets immediate needs and delivers value, it may cause maintenance or performance issues over time.

It is important to make technical debt visible (e.g. on the Product Backlog), and discuss it openly with the Product Owner and the team. Be careful not to "moralise" technical debt, and here the controversial part; sometimes it can be the right decision to deliver now and clean up later — as long as the team is honest about the cost. Secondly, keep in mind that what qualifies as “debt” can be subjective, depending on the level of engineering purism involved. Rely rather on measurable effects like delivery time for maintenance fixes, performance and scalability issues. These can give direct measurement on the cost and benefit (ROI) of fixing technical dept.

Past experiences with overzealous refactoring under the banner of “XP”, introduced new bugs, left the rest of the team unfamiliar with the constantly changing codebase, and contributed to demotivation, slowing delivery, and eroding trust.

In summary record all technical debt in the PB, evaluate carefully, prioritise it like any other work, and make informed decisions about how to address it.

As a practical approach, a past team I worked with had a ground rule: Basic clean code principles were applied in the immediate area being worked on. Larger refactoring or performance improvements were addressed through formal user stories and prioritised in the Product Backlog. The CI/CD pipeline enforced code reviews (Git pull request), and automated code scanning and automated QA scripts had to pass as part of the DOD.