Distributed Agile, Agile Testing, and Technical Debt

Agile teams create business value by responding to changing business environments and delivering working software at regular intervals. While doing so, they make design tradeoffs to satisfy business needs such as meeting a release schedule. Technical debt is the result of such decisions or tradeoffs. When this happens, agile teams must pay off the accumulated debt by improving designs during subsequent iterations in order to improve maintainability. This must happen in a systematic way so that technical debt does not swell up and damage the project. Accomplishing this is one of the major challenges in distributed agile projects. The scope of technical debt in software projects is spread across all areas including architecture, design, code, and test scripts.