FY22-Q1 Verify Frontend Key Result (Product): Quintuple (5x) the amount of tech debt discovered and fixed in FY21Q3 `=> 151.25%`
Description
“You’ve just described ‘technical debt’ that is not being paid down. It comes from taking shortcuts, which may make sense in the short-term. But like financial debt, the compounding interest costs grow over time. If an organization doesn’t pay down its technical debt, every calorie in the organization can be spent just paying interest, in the form of unplanned work.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
We're starting to gather a fair bit of technical debt. Whilst we make efforts to address it generally, I want this KR to focus on really getting it down this quarter. There's two steps to this:
- Find the tech debt that has acrued over the years and raise issues to fix it.
- Schedule those issues and fix the debt.
I hope to triple the effort we had in FY21-Q3 (I chose this over Q4 as we started working on this in January and that skewed the results somewhat).
Note: This one will be more focused on CI than PA, but it makes sense to include both groups in this effort.
TODO:
-
Establish a baseline -
Set a target -
Host meeting to help identifyprioritize tech debt
Progress
Overall progress is calculated using the following:
// Where benchmark and current are the sum of the discovered and closed issues.
100 * current / (benchmark * 5) = completion %
100 * (58 + 63) / ((7 + 9) * 5) = 151.25%| Timeframe | Tech Debt Discovered | Tech Debt Closed |
|---|---|---|
| Q3 (benchmark) | 7 | 9 |
| ---------------- | -------------------- | ---------------- |
| February | 39 | 33 |
| March | 12 | 19 |
| April | 7 | 11 |
| ---------------- | -------------------- | ---------------- |
| Total | 58 +51 | 63 +54 |
Retro
We absolutely smashed this one. Huge shout out to @mrincon @pburdette and @jivanvl for their work on this. We hit 100% completion very early, and kept on pushing through.
Stop
Waiting so long to address tech debt. This big clearout was great, but we shouldn't be in a situation where we have this much tech debt. This can be a lesson in all the good that comes from keeping on top of your tech debt.
Start
Budgeting for tech debt in releases. If we fix a little bit each month, we shouldn't need a big bang effort like this.
Continue
With all that said, I like the idea of a yearly spring clean to get rid of some of the stickier items on the tech debt backlog.