The Agile Executive

Rally’s Richard Leavitt mentioned “his” technical debt in a conversation the two of us had last evening. As Richard is the head of marketing for Rally, I was expecting to hear about some deficit in the functionality, design, coding or testing of one of the market and customer facing websites his department deploys. I was dead wrong.

Richard was actually using technical debt in a generic sense. Anything in his department that they had to rush through and now plan to go back to and revisit/improve/fix is categorized as technical debt. The term applies to (say) laying the foundations for a marketing campaign as much as it does to re-architecting an application in order to improve its performance.

I don’t really know how wide spread the use of “technical debt” in this generic sense is. I am, however, impressed: another term of art is starting to get into the English language! How appropriate that such use of the term starts at a company that applies Agile values and practice to most of its operational and business processes.