46 lines
1.7 KiB
Markdown
46 lines
1.7 KiB
Markdown
|
# Maintenance and Technical Debt Planning
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
## Purpose
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
Turn vague maintenance needs into a practical, sequenced plan that improves delivery speed, reliability, and future change safety over time.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
## When to use
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
- The codebase has accumulated risky or slowing debt
|
||
|
|
- A team needs to prioritize cleanup against feature work
|
||
|
|
- Repeated friction suggests structural maintenance investment is overdue
|
||
|
|
- You need to explain why maintenance work matters in product terms
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
## Inputs to gather
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
- Known pain points, repeated failures, and slow areas in delivery
|
||
|
|
- Architectural hotspots, obsolete patterns, and fragile dependencies
|
||
|
|
- Team constraints, roadmap pressure, and acceptable disruption
|
||
|
|
- Evidence of cost: incidents, churn, slowed feature work, or support burden
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
## How to work
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
- Focus on debt that materially changes future delivery, reliability, or risk.
|
||
|
|
- Group issues into themes rather than a flat list of annoyances.
|
||
|
|
- Prioritize by impact, urgency, and dependency relationships.
|
||
|
|
- Prefer incremental sequences that can ship safely between feature work.
|
||
|
|
- Translate maintenance value into outcomes the team can defend.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
## Output expectations
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
- Prioritized maintenance plan or backlog proposal
|
||
|
|
- Clear rationale for what should happen now versus later
|
||
|
|
- Sequencing guidance and expected payoff
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
## Quality checklist
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
- Recommendations are tied to real delivery or reliability pain.
|
||
|
|
- Prioritization is explicit and defensible.
|
||
|
|
- The plan is incremental enough to execute.
|
||
|
|
- Work is framed in terms of reduced risk or increased velocity, not vague cleanliness.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
## Handoff notes
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
- Note what evidence would strengthen or change the prioritization.
|
||
|
|
- Pair with roadmap and opportunity prioritization when balancing debt against new initiatives.
|