[hinkley]

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I think this is a problem that is compatible with Kanban and incompatible with Scrum. The end of sprint encourages people to mark a task as done that still has several steps and about eight business days before it’s “Done”. But WIP limits in Kanban could be tweaked to account for this and I believe still provide the correct sort of pressure for you to finish what you started before starting something new.

In Limited Work In Progress (LWIP aka WIP-Limited) processes, if you are blocked on your story you help someone else get unblocked on theirs. And then escalate if there is no movement.

[spike021]

As someone whose current team process is Kanban and a previous team were also, tech debt like this still inevitably piles up. Sure maybe you can squeeze some time in but even getting a week to spend solely on cleanup is rare, if it comes up at all.

[hinkley]

The distinction I’m talking about is marking the feature milestone for deployment but not counting the feature as done until the toggle is dispensed with. Either removed, or declared a configuration we intend to keep indefinitely.

Admittedly, there’s still a gap there where a toggle may be needed until the end of an initiative (an Epic in Scrum terms) but that’s going to be at least an order of magnitude, and likely 2 orders, fewer toggles to deal with.

When the order of magnitude changes so does the solution.