If you budget 10% of your team’s time to paying down technical debt, there are a few ways you could do it.
- Make sure 10% of the story points of each sprint are technical debt related
- Assign every other Friday (10% of 2 weeks) to everyone paying down technical debt (see this article for a story about Tech Debt Friday)
- Assign 10% of the team to spend 100% of their time paying down technical debt (rotating who this is every quarter or so, or at project boundaries)
I’ve done some variation on all of these ways, and in my experience, #3 works the best. When I was at Trello, my team allocated more like 30%, but tech debt was lumped together with anything “engineering driven”, which was more than just debt payoff (e.g. tooling).
The main reason #3 works better is how companies typically review and reward developers. Something that is 10% of your work is never going to show up on your review. Over time this is generally a disincentive to do it. But, if you are supposed to spend 100% of your time on something, then it has to show up on your review.
Making this someone’s full time job for a quarter means that they can plan bigger projects with more impact. It’s hard to get a PR done in one day, so it takes about a month to get anything deployed at all. When you work on it full-time, you can deploy much more frequently. When I was on a tech-debt project, I would use the first week to deploy some extra monitoring that could measure impact or catch problems.
It allows devs to get into the zone, which is really helpful in giant refactoring or restructuring/rewrite slogs. If you only get one day every two weeks, you have to reacquaint yourself with anything big, which eats into that one day quickly.
It will also make it more likely that this debt paydown is localized. This makes it easier to test that it hasn’t caused regressions.
Finally, (for managers) it’s easier to measure that you are actually spending your budget correctly because you don’t have to monitor individual stories over time. You just need to track how developers were allocated over time.
Other articles about Tech Debt: