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5 Practical Tips for Prioritizing Technical Debt

Prioritize technical debt alongside feature development to prevent long-term code quality issues. This guide shows you how to integrate tech debt into sprint planning using unbiased estimation, custom frameworks, and stakeholder buy-in.

What you'll need​

Before implementing these tips, understand the Technical Debt Prioritization Framework fundamentals:

  • Code Knowledge - Familiarity with the codebase
  • Severity - Impact on functionality or performance
  • Dependency and Scale - Number of components affected
  • Cost of Fixing - Story points required to resolve

Formula: Total Score = (Knowledge + Severity + Dependency) – 3 × Cost

Try the framework template with a free Ducalis account at https://hi.ducalis.io/signup.

Tip 1: Avoid bias with estimations​

Overestimation, undervaluation, and groupthink commonly distort technical debt estimates. Evaluation Poker eliminates these biases by letting each team member score items independently and asynchronously.

1. Create a new Board​

  1. Use the Technical Debt Prioritization Template.
  2. Alternatively, access the template gallery from your Dashboard.

2. Sync your tech debt backlog​

Connect your task tracker to automatically import technical debt Issues:

  1. Navigate to Integrations.
  2. Connect your task tracker:
  3. Set a filter based on your tech debt property.

All Issues appear in Ducalis in real-time and stay synchronized.

3. Set up Evaluation Poker​

Configure Evaluation Poker to hide estimates until the reveal moment:

  1. Open Board Settings → Evaluation.

  2. Enable Evaluation Poker.

  3. Configure:

    • Start - When estimation begins
    • Reveal - When scores become visible
    • Final - When scores lock

  4. Restrict updates to the final priority score after the reveal moment.

This approach allows each team member to:

  • Avoid influencing others' opinions

  • Take time to think about each backlog item

  • Carefully evaluate each combination of Issues and Criteria

Learn more about Evaluation Poker settings.

Tip 2: Customize the prioritization framework for your team​

1. Customize Criteria​

Write Criteria descriptions that your team understands. Specific descriptions produce better prioritization results.

Define clearly:

  • Sprint durations

  • Dependency definitions

  • Blocker criteria

  • Code knowledge levels

Ensure all team members understand the same definitions and evaluation scales.

Read more about Criteria Description Editing.

2. Assign Criteria to specific team members​

Technical debt often spans multiple infrastructure components (back-end, front-end, DevOps, security). The default template includes only one Cost criterion.

To avoid confusion:

  1. Open Criteria Management.

  2. Duplicate the Cost criterion for each technical area.

  3. Assign each criterion to the relevant team members:

    • Cost (Back-end) → Back-end engineers
    • Cost (Front-end) → Front-end engineers
    • Cost (DevOps) → DevOps team
    • Cost (Security) → Security team

Read more about assigning Criteria to team members.

Tip 3: There are no wrong or correct answers in prioritization​

After revealing the team's evaluations, check if team members aligned on their estimates. Sometimes assessments align closely; other times, scores diverge significantly. Divergent scores often reveal knowledge gaps or alternative solution approaches.

The Team Alignment report highlights differences in opinions.

Lower alignment score → Higher disagreement about the Issue estimation

The Criteria Alignment section highlights the most controversial Issues that need discussion, eliminating the need to review every issue-criterion-score combination.

When you identify a misalignment:

  1. Invite a Facilitator to mediate the discussion.

  2. Update the final score after team discussion.

Learn more:

Tip 4: Regularly review and update the technical debt backlog​

Priorities shift over time. Markets evolve, infrastructure changes, and product strategies pivot. If a high-priority Issue stays in your backlog without movement for a significant period, question its priority.

Regular reviews help you track progress, prioritize Issues, and prevent technical debt accumulation.

Finding time for tech debt backlog grooming can be challenging. The Score Expiration feature helps by resetting scores periodically in small chunks, allowing team members to re-evaluate old Issues at their own pace.

Read more about Score Expiration.

Tip 5: Get buy-in from the Product Manager and stakeholders​

Once you have a prioritized technical debt list, determine what to do next.

The challenge: Technical debt backlogs compete with product backlogs, stakeholder requests, customer demands, and urgent issues.

Solution: Include technical debt Issues in sprint planning alongside user stories and tasks. This balances technical debt resolution with new feature delivery.

Treat product and engineering backlogs as one unified backlog.

With aggregated Boards at Ducalis, you can combine multiple backlogs with different prioritization frameworks into one.

Read more about Aggregated Report Boards.

Conclusion​

Effective technical debt prioritization requires:

  • Unbiased estimation with Evaluation Poker
  • Custom frameworks tailored to your team's needs
  • Regular reviews to keep priorities current
  • Team alignment to resolve disagreements
  • Stakeholder buy-in to balance tech debt with product development

By integrating technical debt into your sprint planning routine, you ensure sustainable development that balances code quality with feature delivery.

Last updated: This week