News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Scrum is fragile, not Agile by alkonaut on Monday May 27, 2019 @03:18AM (#20020112)
> Create tickets for debt, put them on the backlog.

That will risk making a huge technical debt section in the backlog that will find it hard to get priority. It's better to condition new features/bugfixes on the cleanup that caused them. "I can add this feature in 1 day but will need 4 days to clean it up. So my estimate is a week." I constantly nag developers to do this when they find that they are pressed for time and want to make a hack.

-"I'm nearly done but I can't find a nice way of doing this because of an existing code smell so I'm considering adding another smell"

-"Did you ever find that this was NOT the case?"

-"No..."

-"So do you always double or triple your estimates so you know you can comfortably refactor"

-"No..."

I think this is a disease of Scrum. Too short estimates exist because developers pat themselves on the back for finishing things quickly.

Re:Scrum is fragile, not Agile by postfacto on Tuesday May 28, 2019 @12:35AM (#20027239)
That will just lead to stories to change something simple the color of a button taking 3 days because you hit a tech debt minefield refactoring. You don’t want someone looking at JIRA and seeing it took you 3 days to change a simple button color.

Keep technical debt in separate tasks to make the tech debt visible and to keep management accountable for not making efforts to get rid of it.