How much of a Developers’ capacity during a regular Sprint would you consider adequate for refactoring? Fixing important bugs? Exploring new technologies or ideas?
Scrum does not recommend anything about this, but based on my experience, apart from Sprints during which there are critical and urgent tasks to address (such as fixing a problem that has taken the web site offline), a good rule of thumb is a 15-10-5 allocation of a Scrum Team’s capacity to refactoring, fixing, and research. Specifically, this means dedicating:
- 15% of a team’s capacity to technical debt and refactoring,
- 10% of a team’s capacity to bugs, and
- 5% of a team’s capacity to explorative spikes (when potentially helpful).
Developers may, of course, deviate from this rule of thumb depending on the context. Generally, consistently making these allocations will satisfy both the code quality and maintenance requirements of most software applications and build trust among stakeholders regarding the Scrum Team’s capability to deliver valuable product Increments.
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