In Agile, we talk about Technical Debt, but what about debt with respect to functionality.
Let’s build few scenarios.
“Functional Debt is type of Agile Debt which has its origin in functional aspects of the product. Functional Debt has nothing to do with technical aspects of the product.”
Here, I also introduced a new umbrella term, Agile Debt.
“Agile Debt is a debt taken by product to fulfill immediate need (by choice or by ignorance) under Agile methodology.”
I hope, this little explanation on Agile Debt will be helpful.
Let’s build few scenarios.
- Team is building a product sprint by sprint at startup. Sales team rope in a marquee prospect which demands a feature which is not in product vision (at least at this point of time). Startup needs this customer to survive. Higher Management makes a decision to incorporate the feature demanded by this prospect with understanding that in future versions, this feature will not be present or this feature will not be sold to any other customer. Is there any technical debt?
- In a well-established enterprise team is developing an application for internal use. This application will be replacing existing application. The existing application supports some processes which soon to be obsolete but will be required in application in development. Is there any technical debt?
Certainly there is no technical debt involve in these scenarios but a debt. I prefer to call it Functional Debt.
“Functional Debt is type of Agile Debt which has its origin in functional aspects of the product. Functional Debt has nothing to do with technical aspects of the product.”
Here, I also introduced a new umbrella term, Agile Debt.
“Agile Debt is a debt taken by product to fulfill immediate need (by choice or by ignorance) under Agile methodology.”
I hope, this little explanation on Agile Debt will be helpful.
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good definition for functional debt. One question here. Let us assume that we are in Day1 of an agile development project. We have 100 functionalities as part of the product backlog. SHould we call all these as Functional debts until they are developed?
ReplyDeleteThanks krishnadas sankar for your comments.
ReplyDeleteProduct backlog items are not part of Function Debt. PBI is a wish list. But if functionality is developed just for short term gain which is not part of product vision and road map with understanding that it is just stop gap arrangement, it is Function debt. But it does not mean that Function Debt remains a liability, if a functionality counted as functional debt becomes part of product vision and road map then certainly this functionality need not be marked as functional debt.