Technical debt due to bad code quality is one the problem that every Scrum development team might face in their application. In this blog post, Henrik Kniberg discusses the causes of technical debt and provides some hints on how to manage it.
He starts with the recommendation to ask your team a simple question “”How do we feel about the quality of our code?”. If you are working on a legacy system, the question can be “is code quality improving or getting worse?”. Ask the members to rate this on a 1 to 5 scale. Revealing and visualizing the issue is the first step to recovery. Then he suggest to analyse where the pressure to write crappy code comes from. There is a simple view on how to solve this problem: stop writing crappy code. He explains that “code quality” is not equal to “product quality” and discusses also how to deal with the existing technical debt.
His conclusion is that “code quality is the responsibility of the people who actually write the code (otherwise known as Programmers). As programmer, you own the problem, and you own the solution.”. You can continue to write crappy code, but then you shouldn’t call yourself Agile.
Read the complete blog post on http://blog.crisp.se/2013/07/12/henrikkniberg/the-solution-to-technical-debt