Can you outline your method for balancing the priorities of developing new features and managing technical debt?

Question

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

During planning there are 3 buckets of workstreams I pay attention to - 
1. KTLO bucket which consists of team oncall ie. sev remediation & sev reports,
sev corrective actions and tech debt projects 
2. Platform or core foundation investments 
3. Product features

If our systems are relatively stable the KTLO bucket gets 25-30% allocation. For
tech debt projects I meet with the tech leads every quarter to understand the
importance of any of of the tech debt accumulation and prioritize them into
different levels based on urgency, effort, business impact etc. If there are
more P0s there then the allocation looks more like 40%. Some projects that have
come under this are increasing integration test coverage, improved monitoring
and system generated alerts, dead code cleanup etc.

Anonymous · Answer

To balance new feature development and technical debt, allocate dedicated time
for debt reduction, integrate debt work into feature development, and establish
clear processes and a quality-focused culture.

Anonymous · Answer

Technical debt is inevitable part of devleopment process, At Auctane, I had a
buffer of 10-15% of sprint cycle to address any technicl debt. I had maintained
two buckets - tech debt and the other feature buckets - All low hanging tech
debt was a valuable tool for new comers to team, during shipping season we would
actively stop working on new features- these were dedeciated to tech debt for
the team. For e.g. there were many stored proc with dead code - this caused lot
of issues to debug - etc we identified these are candidates to refactor and
improve - we took this in small increments and chip away at the tech debt.  By
actively addressing the tech debt while working on new features - I could manage
the tech debt.

Anonymous · Answer

80 - 20, 80% in my experience the balance is 80% to new features and 20% to tech
debt or reliability

Can you outline your method for balancing the priorities of developing new features and managing technical debt?

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