Which technical debt should we work on first?

Over the last few projects we’ve sometimes had problems with deciding on which technical debt we should play first. Sometimes the most interesting pieces of technical debt are not the most important to work on. To try and resolve this we’re categorising our debt into three groups…

• Things that will make the project a success.
• Things that will make us faster or less prone to error.
• Things that will not make us faster but offer improvement.

Each category is ordered by how effective it would be at achieving the goal of that category. When we have the capacity to pick up technical debt it is selected starting at the first category and only moving to the next if there is nothing remaining or nothing that can be done yet. All of these group headings and their debt is clearly displayed next to our story wall.

So far we’ve gained a few benefits from doing this…

• We have a set of rules that allow anyone to add and take from the backlog of technical debt.
• The amount of debt is visible to all and how critical that debt is to the success of the project.