Problem Statement
How do you handle technical debt? / Tell me about balancing technical debt with new features.
Explanation
I handle technical debt by maintaining a backlog of identified issues, regularly allocating 20 to 30 percent of sprint capacity to address high-priority debt, and ensuring stakeholders understand that ignoring technical debt will eventually slow down feature development. When management pushed for only new features, I presented data showing how accumulated technical debt was increasing bug fix time and slowing development, and proposed a balanced approach. This helped gain buy-in for dedicated refactoring time, and our velocity actually improved after addressing critical technical debt, proving that sustainable development requires this balance.
Practice Sets
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