Template

Technical Debt Management with Atlassian Jira

Identify, track, prioritize, and reduce technical debt using Jira, Confluence, and automated reporting across development teams.

The Technical Debt Management Template provides a structured way to capture technical debt, assess its impact, schedule remediation work, and track progress across sprints and releases. Built on Jira and Confluence, it centralizes all technical debt items, aligns them with product roadmaps, and measures their effect on stability, performance, and development velocity. Dashboards help teams and leadership visualise trends, risks, and long-term improvement.

Why you need a Technical Debt Management Template

Centralised View of All Debt

A single place where teams log architecture issues, refactoring needs, legacy code, and system gaps.

Prioritisation Based on Impact

Debt can be scored by risk, severity, customer impact, cost to fix, or effect on delivery speed.

Better Planning and Forecasting

Debt items integrate directly into sprints, backlogs, roadmaps, and capacity planning.

Improved System Stability

Addressing technical debt proactively reduces bugs, outages, and support costs.

Visibility for Leadership

Dashboards show long-term trends, debt accumulation, and overall engineering health.

Aligned With Continuous Improvement

Supports modern development practices where teams measure, learn, refactor, and improve iteratively.

Who will use a Technical Debt with Atlassian JiraTemplate

Developers – Log debt items, propose fixes, and monitor progress.
Tech Leads & Architects – Prioritise improvements and define remediation strategy.
Product Managers – Balance new features with essential maintenance work.
QA & SRE Teams – Report issues that originate from technical debt.
Engineering Managers – Track improvement trends and allocate capacity.
Executives – Understand risk exposure and long-term product sustainability.

BPMN Diagram for Bugs Triage to Implement on Atlassian Jira

technical debt management with Jira Atlassian

What is included in the Technical Debt Management Template on Atlassian Jira

Technical Debt Issue Type – A dedicated Jira item for logging and describing debt.
Debt Categorisation – Architecture debt, code quality, performance issues, infrastructure gaps, and security risks.
Impact & Risk Scoring Fields – Cost to fix, risk level, severity, affected components, customer impact, and urgency.
Root Cause Documentation – Linked Confluence pages for deeper analysis, architectural notes, or diagrams.
Integration With Sprints & Roadmaps – Debt items can be planned alongside new features using Jira boards and Advanced Roadmaps.
Remediation Workflows – Clear workflow steps: identified → assessed → prioritised → implemented → verified.
Time & Cost Tracking – Link debt tasks to timesheets and cost dashboards to understand investment in maintenance.
Trend Dashboards – EazyBI reports on total debt, age of unresolved items, risk exposure, and long-term reduction trends.
Links to Incidents & Bugs – Associate debt items with JSM incidents or Jira bugs for better root-cause visibility.
Automated Notifications – Alerts when high-impact debt ages, grows, or affects critical components.
Customisable Severity Models – Map strategic importance to business impact, product goals, or compliance requirements.