Reduce technical debt by making its costs visible in the product backlog, agreeing on a testable quality standard, and keeping changes small enough to integrate and verify frequently. Prioritize repayment when evidence shows that debt is causing rework, slowing planned changes, or increasing reliability or security risk—not because a fixed share of each sprint is supposedly required.
What technical debt looks like in an agile project
Technical debt is not limited to untidy code. It can include fragile tests, difficult deployment steps, risky dependencies, unclear interfaces, or legacy components that make changes slower or less reliable. The useful question is not simply whether something could be cleaner; it is what concrete cost or risk it creates.
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Describe the behavior or component involved, the consequence of leaving it as-is, and a plausible next action. Separate confirmed defects or security exposures from maintainability concerns and speculative redesigns. When available, link the item to repeated rework, incidents, or product changes it is blocking.
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How should we prioritize technical debt in the backlog?
Make meaningful debt work visible alongside product work and order it according to consequences. The November 2020 Scrum Guide calls the Product Backlog the single source of work undertaken by the Scrum Team; it does not require a separate technical-debt backlog.
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For each candidate item, ask:
- What upcoming change does this make harder, slower, or riskier?
- How often does it cause rework, defects, incidents, or delays?
- What reliability, security, or operational risk accumulates if it remains?
- What is the smallest safe and reversible change that reduces the cost?
- Are other teams or systems dependencies that affect the timing or scope?
Compare candidates by risk reduced, recurring rework removed, improvement to feedback, effect on planned product work, intervention size, and dependencies. A repeated source of defects or a risky dependency may deserve priority over code that is merely awkward. Make the trade-off explicit with the Product Owner and Developers rather than relying on a blanket rule.
Should technical debt be a separate backlog?
Not necessarily. A separate list can help with discovery or technical tracking, but it should not hide priority decisions from the people ordering product work. Keep actionable debt items in the Product Backlog or ensure the team has a clear way to bring tracked items into its ordered work. Give each item enough context to understand its impact, urgency, and next step.
Agree on a practical Definition of Done
The Scrum Guide makes the Definition of Done the shared quality commitment for an Increment: work that does not meet it is not part of the Increment. Scrum does not prescribe one universal checklist; criteria should reflect the product’s actual risks and needs.
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Prevent debt from compounding with small, integrated changes
DORA’s continuous integration guidance recommends frequent integration to a shared mainline, small batches, automated builds and tests, and treating a broken build as a priority. Smaller changes shorten the search for a regression and reduce the amount of unfinished work that can drift away from the shared code.
- Integrate frequently instead of keeping long-lived branches.
- Automate builds and tests so the team gets feedback consistently.
- Keep tests reliable and fast enough to guide the next change. DORA says tests should take a few minutes, with about 10 minutes as an upper limit in its cited guidance; treat this as guidance, not a universal law.
- Make a broken build visible and restore it promptly rather than stacking more changes on top.
- Reduce manual build and release steps where they repeatedly delay or destabilize delivery.
DORA describes CI as a way to create rapid feedback loops and help teams work in small batches. That is a useful mechanism for limiting the cost of change, not a guarantee that tooling alone will eliminate debt.
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How much sprint capacity should we reserve for technical debt?
There is no Scrum-mandated percentage. The Scrum Guide does not prescribe a fixed technical-debt allocation, and a fixed number can obscure whether the most important product risk is actually being addressed. Capacity needs depend on the team’s evidence, product constraints, and the ordered work.
Instead, make debt visible and decide on specific work during backlog ordering and sprint planning. If the team experiments with reserving capacity, treat the percentage as a local hypothesis: state why it was chosen, inspect whether risk or rework fell, and adjust it based on results.
Use retrospectives to change the causes, not just close tickets
Look for recurring patterns: unclear standards, fragile tests, merge conflicts, manual release steps, or a component that repeatedly creates rework. Choose a high-impact improvement, make it actionable, and inspect its effect. The Scrum Guide frames the retrospective around improving quality and effectiveness; impactful improvements can be addressed promptly or added to the Sprint Backlog.
A 2021 multinational practitioner survey with 184 responses, including practitioners in Brazil, Finland, and New Zealand, reported that practices for verifying and maintaining the structure and clarity of implemented artifacts were particularly helpful for reducing technical debt. Its authors also noted competing stakeholder interests. These are survey findings, not causal proof or a representative estimate of all software teams.
Measure whether the intervention helped
Choose a small number of measures tied to the problem rather than counting debt tickets closed. Depending on the bottleneck, inspect:
- Elapsed time from a change entering work to release, including time waiting in review or testing.
- Work sent back for correction and recurring defect or rework rates.
- How long a broken build takes to recover and whether test feedback is reliable.
- Whether planned changes in the affected component have become easier to deliver.
- Change failure rate when the intervention is intended to reduce release risk.
DORA’s value-stream mapping guidance recommends examining where work waits, where errors occur, and how much time is value-add versus elapsed time. Use measures diagnostically; rewarding teams for closing more cleanup items can produce activity without reducing the underlying cost.
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Choose delivery improvements without creating new risks
Continuous delivery aims to keep software deployable and releases low risk; it does not mean every change must automatically go to production. Continuous deployment is a separate practice and is not suitable for every product. Likewise, increasing deployment frequency without improving process and architecture can raise failure rates or contribute to burnout. Tooling helps when paired with sound technical and process practices.
Map a bottleneck with the people doing the work, identify a practical future state, and make a measured improvement. Prefer a small change that tests a specific hypothesis over a speculative rewrite whose benefits and risks are unclear.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Can agile teams work on technical debt during a feature sprint?
Yes. Put the work into the ordered product backlog and make its trade-off explicit during planning; it need not be a separate project.
Does paying down technical debt always make delivery faster?
No. The case is strongest when evidence connects a proposed change to recurring rework, risk, or blocked product work; speculative cleanup may not repay its cost.
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