Impact of Technical Debt and Undone work

Technical Debt and Undone work are not just potential factors, but imminent threats that could have severe consequences on a team’s effectiveness. It's crucial to discuss these two essential concepts, especially for executives and business leaders, as the need for immediate action is paramount.

Technical debt is best explained as the impact of sacrificing quality for speed. It manifests itself in the product as work that needs to be done at some point in the future; failure to fix technical debt will grind the product team's work to a halt at some point.

Undone work on the other hand is work that isn't done based on the Definition of Done; Undone work is created due to many reasons such as multitasking, silos in a team, inability of an individual and/or team to focus, a lack of rigorous prioritisation among many other.

Time-to-market is a crucial metric for every product-led organisation. As a result, executives and business leaders are curious and will ask the dreaded question, “When will it be done?” Yes, some practices, such as estimation, flow metrics, etc., might be helpful for forecasts. 

However, when dates slip due to undone work, the timeline is not the only one affected. In extreme cases, the entire team can be left feeling frustrated and demotivated. This underscores the urgent need for a solution.

As discussed in previous posts, product delivery is complex, and it is almost impossible to predict when items will be delivered. This phenomenon is further complicated by products laden with technical debt and a product backlog with undone work. Technical debt and Undone work are invincible in the backlog, which is one reason why the forecast might be far from the work perceived by all.

Building on a product laden with technical debt will usually take longer than expected due to unexpected complexity in the codebase, leading to defects in areas of the product that weren't anticipated. Development and Testing usually take longer on the product with high levels of technical debt, possibly up to three times longer.

To illustrate the impact of undone work, imagine that a team has estimated work on a particular feature to be completed in 2 weeks; if the team works for 1 week and is then pulled to work on a higher priority feature for the next 4 weeks. When the team picks up the original feature, it is almost likely the time required to complete the work would be more than 1 week due to reasons such as other parts of the code moving on, context switching, among many others.

As explained above, the cumulative effect of technical debt and undone work is that the effort required to deliver on commitments increases exponentially due to the complexities.

To mitigate these effects, leaders must engage their teams around the potential impact of undone work and technical debt. We have written extensively on strategies to reduce technical debt, including providing transparency on the technical debt levels within the product backlog and fixing the technical debts as soon as possible. For more information, refer to the initial article. 

To reduce undone work, leaders must actively support their team in reducing Work in Progress. Strategies such as “WIP Limits” should be applied at all levels, allowing teams to collaborate to get initiatives done before picking up new ones. The Kanban slogan—“stop starting and start finishing”—highlights the need for a change in strategy. If we genuinely care about shortening time to market, leaders must pay attention to these two - Technical Debt and Undone work.