Making Technical Debt Visible

One of the principal benefits of the technical debt metaphor is that it enables the development team and the business people to have a necessary conversation using a shared context. To have that conversation, both need visibility into the product’s technical debt position in a way that each can understand.

Make Technical Debt Visible at the Business Level

The problem in many organizations is that whereas the development team has at least some reasonable visibility into the product’s technical debt position, the business people typically do not. Ask any technical person who has knowledge of a product where the greatest concentration of technical debt in the product is, and chances are she can answer that question. Ask the same question of a business person and she will typically have no appreciable understanding of how much, or what type of, technical debt exists.