The Technical Debt Initiative is now closed
Ward Cunningham, one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto, once said that some problems with code are like financial debt. It’s OK to borrow against the future, as long as you pay it off.
Since Cunningham first used this metaphor, which he called technical debt, it has gained momentum. However, there is a lack of guidance and good practices available to leverage the metaphor in concrete ways to help developers, teams, and organizations.
It is our mission to help those in the agile community build technically healthy products. We do this by:
- providing executives with tools to understand the financial, productivity, morale, risk, and other impacts of technical debt and to guide investments to improve the technical health of their product portfolio.
- providing managers with guidance to incorporate technical health into product and portfolio planning.
- providing teams with guidance to measure technical debt and improve the technical health of the products they build.
- identifying the root causes of technical debt at multiple levels of organizations, from individual developers to the board room.
If you are a manager or team leader, you can start getting help with your technical debt challenges by following this link to our Quick Start Guide For Managers.
If you are an executive, you can get help in addressing executive-level concerns about technical debt by following this link to our Quick Start Guide For Executives.
