Breaking the Debt Cycle: The Agile Way to Innovate and Sustain
In the world of agile process improvement, we often encounter challenges that are surprisingly similar to financial debt. Just like how only paying the minimum on a credit card bill can lead to an overwhelming debt, not addressing technical debt in organizations can lead to an unsustainable cycle of temporary fixes and an inability to move forward with new projects.
The Power of Short Improvement Planning Horizons
Short improvement planning horizons bring several benefits:
- Flexibility: These horizons allow for quick reprioritization and preplanning.
- Rapid Feedback and Learning: By reducing the time between effort and improvement, learning from each iteration happens faster.
- Quick Wins: There’s a quicker realization of changes that make a meaningful difference in our daily work.
- Reduced Risk: Shorter horizons mean there’s less chance of a project being killed before any real results are produced.
As highlighted in “The Agile Consultant: Guiding Clients to Enterprise Agility,” adopting short time horizons, inclusiveness, and minimum viable plans instead of committing to numerous objectives that may never be delivered is a more effective approach. This strategy is increasingly being adopted in agile enterprises through big-room planning sessions, where plans and ideas are made visible to the entire organization, and priorities are set by consensus.
Tackling Technical Debt: The 20% Rule
To effectively manage technical debt, it’s essential to allocate at least 20% of all development and operational capacity to refactoring, automation, architecture improvements, and addressing non-functional requirements. These are vital for the long-term health of any system. Marty Cagan, in his book “Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love,” advocates for this approach, suggesting that product management should set aside 20% of a team’s capacity for these crucial tasks. Without this, technical debt can increase to a point where all resources are spent addressing it, halting new feature delivery and innovation.
Marty Cagan, in his influential work “Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love,” underscores this approach by advising that product management should allocate 20% of a team’s capacity for engineering to use as they see fit. This strategic allocation helps control technical debt and prevents it from escalating to a point where an organization spends all its development cycles addressing it. Eventually, if not managed, technical debt can make services so fragile that feature delivery grinds to a halt, with engineers preoccupied with reliability issues or circumventing problems.
LinkedIn’s Operation Inversion: A Case Study
LinkedIn’s journey is a perfect example of this principle in action. After rapid growth, LinkedIn faced significant technical challenges. To address this, the company initiated “Operation Inversion,” halting new feature development to focus on core infrastructure improvements. This allowed LinkedIn to pay down nearly a decade of technical debt, paving the way for future growth and stability. However, it required a significant shift in focus to non-functional requirements for two months, even at the cost of delaying new features promised to the market..
Conclusion
In conclusion, by adopting short improvement planning horizons and dedicating a substantial portion of our effort to managing technical debt, organizations can foster a more agile, flexible, and sustainable development environment. This approach ensures that technical debt doesn’t hinder our capacity to develop and operate efficiently, allowing us to respond swiftly and safely to market demands and opportunities.
