As someone in the dev team for a “business app”, we probably know about most or all of them, but they’re just not important enough for anyone in management to prioritize them as part of a sprint. It’s also possible no one has given us reproducible steps to make them happen, so we just straight up don’t know what to fix. Usually the former though.
The struggle is real. “We could spend an entire sprint chasing down debt which impacts 10% of users, or we could add another feature which will generate 10% additional revenue.”
Management will always choose number 2. Code maintenance is like dead money until something really breaks. The best you can do is quietly have engineers fix low hanging fruit as part of feature sprints, but that requires engineers who give enough fucks to do some extra work.
As someone in the dev team for a “business app”, we probably know about most or all of them, but they’re just not important enough for anyone in management to prioritize them as part of a sprint. It’s also possible no one has given us reproducible steps to make them happen, so we just straight up don’t know what to fix. Usually the former though.
The struggle is real. “We could spend an entire sprint chasing down debt which impacts 10% of users, or we could add another feature which will generate 10% additional revenue.”
Management will always choose number 2. Code maintenance is like dead money until something really breaks. The best you can do is quietly have engineers fix low hanging fruit as part of feature sprints, but that requires engineers who give enough fucks to do some extra work.