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I've always wondered about other people's experiences with backlogs. In all of the client accounts I've been to, a backlog was at the end of the day, simply lea

I've always wondered about other people's experiences with backlogs. In all of the client accounts I've been to, a backlog was at the end of the day, simply leadership acknowledgement that there exists more work to do than there is budget to do it, and the backlog really should be mostly the last stage of an issue triage. I wonder if any organizations would benefit from the effort to maintain an officially-recognized triage list of "we have to let these remediations die" issues, instead of a backlog. Once issues make it into a backlog and stay there for longer than T time (usually about a year), I've very rarely seen the issue make it out of the backlog into a sprint again, even years later. At that point, it makes more sense to write up these issues into an architecture document that explicitly acknowledges the technical debt as the cost of doing business around the codebase while relating context to the rest of the architecture, and work up a systematic way to track the technical debt. And track the estimated effort that goes into working around each item in that list in the sense of, "if I didn't have to work around this debt, and it was fixed in the manner noted, I estimate it would take me -T time to complete this task instead". At least that way leadership gets a sense of the actual cost of carrying specific pieces of debt around over time instead of only being able to evaluate acute debt. It might be acceptable to pay an estimated 100 hours per year for one item indefinitely, while for another similar item the underlying business mechanics makes it worthwhile to fix it now than let it accumulate over a 5 year schedule.

gen220 7y ago
At my current place of work, we‘ve been experimenting with two-week “sprints” (hate the term but it’s standard, so bear with me!). We spend half of the off-week sprint planning session “pruning” the backlog: pointing and discussing new tickets, and refactoring or deleting the oldest tickets. If the second half of anyone’s sprint fees thin, we add a ticket (more or less of their choice) from the backlog to their sprint. I kind of like this system, because it allows you to think in cycles both longer and shorter than the sprint. If I see some fun optimization, but know I won’t be able to fit it into my sprint, I can craft a well-documented ticket in confidence that someone will have fun getting to take care of it in the future. Backlog tickets are also a fantastic way to onboard new engineers, because the tickets come from all corners of our system: from infrastructure upgrades to copy changes. Of course this system only works as long as you have disciplined engineers. Bad tickets will drown this system. But the “checkpoint” every other week has really been all we’ve needed to keep quality consistently high.
sergioisidoro 7y ago
I completely agree with what you said. But tech debt, at least for me, feels very different from the tasks that should be triaged. It's very uncommon that we allocate time to repay certain debt, so does it make sense to triage and/or backlog? That was mainly my point with previous comment. My experience is more like doing some other task, coming across some tech debt, and repaying it on the spot if I'm not that constrained by time. For paying debt on the spot having a clearly flagged issue and proposed resolution would likely help me navigating and avoiding known caveats, and get a fix faster. Even if I don't have time to fix the issue in the spot, knowing the reason why things are like they are might help with my morale and be less frustrated with coworkers. But you mentioned a systematic way of tracking tech debt and the cost of each item per year. How is that different from a backlog after a while?
- PretzelFisch 7y ago
  From a lead, product manager position yes. When I know what is coming down the pipe I can push the rework backlog items in a prior sprint, so that things don't get difficult for the following sprints feature set. It does work assuming my pipeline is consistent and not at a tail chasing stage.
- yourapostasy 7y ago
  > But you mentioned a systematic way of tracking tech debt and the cost of each item per year. How is that different from a backlog after a while? Backlogs I've seen have tended to evolve into a graveyard of wish list items. But there is rarely even an attempt at quantifying the organizational cost of putting off tackling the debt until it ties into some obvious, acute measure that usually is some capex, typically software licensing, or some really way off opex, like hundreds of operations staff manually addressing issues that could be automated. I'm wondering with so many organizations now tracking software engineering effort at a relatively granular level now with various degrees of agile projects, whether or not I could leverage the mere fact that we're seeing the effort listed out now. Example: my team has a bunch of servers all mounting an NFS file share. Neither the OS or NAS teams ensure the mounts stay up. For a few years before I arrived, the mounts across the landscape just deteriorate, handled by individual support tickets until the degradation becomes too large to ignore, and then a task is tacked onto the current sprint for some poor schmoe to log into each server and ensure the mount works. A quick scan of the incident tickets and the historical tasks gave me a defensible estimate of an average of 50 man-hours per year spent on this issue alone, not even counting any meetings to discuss it with customers. In the real world, I had to use my personal Emacs Org mode agenda to keep attempting (until I succeeded) to add a task to an upcoming sprint to put in requests to automate monitoring, mounting, and alerting the OS and NAS teams when the mount fails. In "systematic technical debt management" world, when I see the incident pattern I would create a backlog task. The backlog item sinks to the graveyard/tech debt status, and every time a new incident or task comes up that would not if we resolve that debt, the time it takes to address the incident or task gets added to the debt. The problem I'm wrestling with implementing such a mechanism is it relies upon people to remember and care about the debt in the first place, to associate it with a current work effort. That doesn't work in my experience; it's hard enough to get people to share what they are working on in such ticketing systems in the first place.
amenod 7y ago
> I wonder if any organizations would benefit from the effort to maintain an officially-recognized triage list of "we have to let these remediations die" issues, instead of a backlog. Once issues make it into a backlog and stay there for longer than T time (usually about a year), I've very rarely seen the issue make it out of the backlog into a sprint again, even years later. Another option is to treat backlog as a graveyard for issues. They might rise from the dead, but most of them will not. Still, it is useful to have them. When someone comes with a "novel" idea they can use the old ticket with all the existing discussion pro & cons instead of starting the same conversation over and over again. Surprisingly lots of things only seem like a good idea, but when discussed they turn out to be WONTFIX issues.

gen220 7y ago

At my current place of work, we‘ve been experimenting with two-week “sprints” (hate the term but it’s standard, so bear with me!). We spend half of the off-week sprint planning session “pruning” the backlog: pointing and discussing new tickets, and refactoring or deleting the oldest tickets. If the second half of anyone’s sprint fees thin, we add a ticket (more or less of their choice) from the backlog to their sprint. I kind of like this system, because it allows you to think in cycles both longer and shorter than the sprint. If I see some fun optimization, but know I won’t be able to fit it into my sprint, I can craft a well-documented ticket in confidence that someone will have fun getting to take care of it in the future. Backlog tickets are also a fantastic way to onboard new engineers, because the tickets come from all corners of our system: from infrastructure upgrades to copy changes. Of course this system only works as long as you have disciplined engineers. Bad tickets will drown this system. But the “checkpoint” every other week has really been all we’ve needed to keep quality consistently high.

sergioisidoro 7y ago

I completely agree with what you said. But tech debt, at least for me, feels very different from the tasks that should be triaged. It's very uncommon that we allocate time to repay certain debt, so does it make sense to triage and/or backlog? That was mainly my point with previous comment. My experience is more like doing some other task, coming across some tech debt, and repaying it on the spot if I'm not that constrained by time. For paying debt on the spot having a clearly flagged issue and proposed resolution would likely help me navigating and avoiding known caveats, and get a fix faster. Even if I don't have time to fix the issue in the spot, knowing the reason why things are like they are might help with my morale and be less frustrated with coworkers. But you mentioned a systematic way of tracking tech debt and the cost of each item per year. How is that different from a backlog after a while?

PretzelFisch 7y ago
From a lead, product manager position yes. When I know what is coming down the pipe I can push the rework backlog items in a prior sprint, so that things don't get difficult for the following sprints feature set. It does work assuming my pipeline is consistent and not at a tail chasing stage.
yourapostasy 7y ago
> But you mentioned a systematic way of tracking tech debt and the cost of each item per year. How is that different from a backlog after a while? Backlogs I've seen have tended to evolve into a graveyard of wish list items. But there is rarely even an attempt at quantifying the organizational cost of putting off tackling the debt until it ties into some obvious, acute measure that usually is some capex, typically software licensing, or some really way off opex, like hundreds of operations staff manually addressing issues that could be automated. I'm wondering with so many organizations now tracking software engineering effort at a relatively granular level now with various degrees of agile projects, whether or not I could leverage the mere fact that we're seeing the effort listed out now. Example: my team has a bunch of servers all mounting an NFS file share. Neither the OS or NAS teams ensure the mounts stay up. For a few years before I arrived, the mounts across the landscape just deteriorate, handled by individual support tickets until the degradation becomes too large to ignore, and then a task is tacked onto the current sprint for some poor schmoe to log into each server and ensure the mount works. A quick scan of the incident tickets and the historical tasks gave me a defensible estimate of an average of 50 man-hours per year spent on this issue alone, not even counting any meetings to discuss it with customers. In the real world, I had to use my personal Emacs Org mode agenda to keep attempting (until I succeeded) to add a task to an upcoming sprint to put in requests to automate monitoring, mounting, and alerting the OS and NAS teams when the mount fails. In "systematic technical debt management" world, when I see the incident pattern I would create a backlog task. The backlog item sinks to the graveyard/tech debt status, and every time a new incident or task comes up that would not if we resolve that debt, the time it takes to address the incident or task gets added to the debt. The problem I'm wrestling with implementing such a mechanism is it relies upon people to remember and care about the debt in the first place, to associate it with a current work effort. That doesn't work in my experience; it's hard enough to get people to share what they are working on in such ticketing systems in the first place.

amenod 7y ago

> I wonder if any organizations would benefit from the effort to maintain an officially-recognized triage list of "we have to let these remediations die" issues, instead of a backlog. Once issues make it into a backlog and stay there for longer than T time (usually about a year), I've very rarely seen the issue make it out of the backlog into a sprint again, even years later. Another option is to treat backlog as a graveyard for issues. They might rise from the dead, but most of them will not. Still, it is useful to have them. When someone comes with a "novel" idea they can use the old ticket with all the existing discussion pro & cons instead of starting the same conversation over and over again. Surprisingly lots of things only seem like a good idea, but when discussed they turn out to be WONTFIX issues.