Southern Fried Agile 2019

Hi, I am David Brown and over the years working with different teams, I’ve commonly seen Dev Team carry the burden of completely owning the Technical that that builds up when creating software products while trying to balance delivering new features to the business and customer at a rate that is hard to maintain. To avoid this, teams will either draw down capacity or inflate story estimation instead of trying to converse or educate the Product Owner on the various elements of “non-functional requirements” that they take on. I’ve also seen where teams designate full sprints just to refactoring or stand up a new team to consume the debt. More often than not, any of these type of work-arounds decrease a team’s agility and feed common behaviors of dysfunctional teams. I feel I have discovered an answer to this common problem and would like to share this tool with the attendees at Southern Fried Agile 2019. The basis of this tool is collectively creating a type of assumption map (commonly used in design thinking), for teams to plot out: • current state know Technical Debt items currently in the tool. • new items that are created during a sprint • help the PO and dev team identify which items can be consumed into a sprint that complements the sprint backlog and supports the teams sprint goal. Yes, there are digital tools that heat map certain types of technical debt that can be solved with refactoring and implementing stronger coding standards. But often we see organizations that do not want to invest in the services and these tools don’t typically encourage more collaboration among the team. Some of the largest benefits of the team mapping this out together are: • coaching the PO Owner on what is really under the hood of their product • encouraging a better shared understanding on how much technical debt is healthy for the team and their type of product • alignment on when to solve for what problems along the way • helping the Product Owners that do not have a strong technical background, understand another area of improvement in their prioritization strategy.