Agile Chronicles #12: Technical Debt

Via some route I got to this interesting article by Jesse Warden about technical debt, especially when using Scrum. Two great quotes:

If your team is working on fixing bugs, they aren’t working on user stories.

Bugs do not deliver business value, their cost of fixing is part of realizing the original story.

It’s generally assumed that 80% of your 2 week Sprint is spent refactoring. I’ll let that sink in.

Think about that! To realize user stories, 80% of the sprint the team is busy adapting existing software to make sure the new feature fits perfectly. Scrum doesn’t mean quick & dirty programming.

In Scrum preventing technical debt is a daytime job. If you don’t pay enough attention it will come back and you’ll have to pay with interest.

Beyond Functional Requirements On Agile Projects

Article describing strategies for addressing nonfunctional requirements in an agile development environment. Nonfunctional requirements (NFRs), also known as “technical requirements” or “quality of service” (QoS) requirements, focus on aspects that typically cross-cut functional requirements. Common NFRs include accuracy, availability, concurrency, consumability (a superset of usability), environmental/green concerns, internationalization, operations issues, performance, regulatory concerns, reliability, security, serviceability, support, and timeliness.