Best practices for managing technical debt in Jira separate project or integrated approach?

[Vitalii Rybka]

Hey everyone,

Our development team is struggling with how to properly track and prioritize technical debt alongside feature work. We're currently using a single Jira project for everything, but technical debt items often get buried under feature requests and bug fixes.

Current approach:

• Everything in one project with different issue types (Story, Bug, Technical Debt)
• Technical debt gets deprioritized during sprint planning
• Hard to get visibility on accumulated tech debt

Considering these options:

1. Separate "Tech Debt" project - dedicated space but might create silos
2. Custom fields + dashboards - keep everything together but add better tracking
3. Labels/components approach - simpler but less structured

Questions:

• How do you handle technical debt visibility in your Jira setup?
• Do you allocate specific sprint capacity for tech debt, and if so, how do you track it?
• Any automation rules that help with tech debt prioritization?

Would love to hear how other teams are solving this!

Thanks!

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Vitalii Rybka 

In my opinion, there are no best practices; there are only better or worse ones for a specific team and the current context.  And thus...

Please consider what your team means by "technical debt", and more importantly, how you explain the cost / benefit of those work items to the people who prioritize work. 

Teams always have limited capacity, and so keeping the possible work items together in one place (i.e., one Jira project) may help to make decisions about which items to do "next" and "why".  Perhaps try explaining the short-term and long-term costs if such improvement and maintenance work is not done, relative to the benefits possible (e.g., fewer production defects, ability to deliver faster, higher team morale by solving code-base impediments, etc.)  This can start with a conversation with the team's product owner / champion.

Also perhaps review your value stream practices and processes.  Small and large scale practices often include processes to manage improvement work, including guidance on how to get that prioritized for delivery using explainable and defensible measures.

Kind regards,
Bill